Haters Gonna Hate: Tolkien's 'Shakespeare (which I disliked cordially)'

In February 1977 Fleetwood Mac released their album Rumours, to huge acclaim and huger sales. At the time I was in high school and a fan of groups like The Rolling Stones and Bruce Springsteen on the one hand, and Yes and Pink Floyd on the other. If you think such widely divergent tastes should have been able to take in so eminently talented and accomplished a band as Fleetwood Mac, you would be quite mistaken. Not even the fay charms of Stevie Nicks could win me over. I hated the band. I hated the album. You might even say I cordially disliked it.

Forty-five years later, I think it is an absolutely amazing piece of work in pretty much every way. But if all you saw were the words, 'I hated the band. I hated the album', you might not realize that I was talking about what my opinion was about something long, long ago. You might think that I still feel that way. In truth, those two sentences in the past tense reveal nothing one way or the other about how I feel now. The best understanding of those two sentences is as a simple statement about the past. With a bit more context, it's easier to see that I was talking about feelings I had in the youth of my world. Perhaps I still have them, perhaps not, but my focus was on how I felt at that time specifically, not any other.

In a 1955 letter to W. H. Auden Tolkien spoke of his time at King Edward's School in Birmingham, which he left in 1911, forty-four years earlier, to go up to Oxford. 

I went to King Edward's School and spent most of my time learning Latin and Greek; but I also learned English. Not English Literature! Except Shakespeare (which I disliked cordially), the chief contacts with poetry were when one was made to try and translate it into Latin. Not a bad mode of introduction, if a bit casual. I mean something of the English language and its history.

(Letters no. 163, p. 213)

The context is all important here, though often little or none of it is supplied. He is speaking, as I was above, about how he felt about something he encountered over four decades earlier. The tense of 'disliked' is the same as that of all the other verbs except 'mean' in the final sentence, which refers to what he 'means' now when he says he 'learned English' then. 

Tolkien's use of 'disliked cordially' should also call to mind his other even more famous use of this phrase in his foreword to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings:

Other arrangements could be devised according to the tastes or views of those who like allegory or topical reference. But I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence.  

Contrast the present tense of 'dislike' here with the past tense used in the letter to Auden. Tolkien is speaking of his current feelings about allegory, and, as the next clause suggests, these feelings started a long time ago and have continued into the present. So, though it shouldn't need stating, the man clearly knew his business when it came to the tenses of English verbs.

This phrase 'cordially dislike' also merits scrutiny. The word 'cordially' has become rare (at least) in the United States except in the fossilized 'you are cordially invited', and those of us who know that it means 'with all one's heart', 'wholeheartedly' or 'with hearty friendliness and goodwill' might find its pairing by Tolkien with 'dislike' slightly jarring. That is precisely the point of the juxtaposition, however. It came to be used, as the OED tells us, 'chiefly as an ironic intensifier', a more striking alternative for 'thoroughly'. The two words together, moreover, were something of a pair for a while, becoming ever more frequently used until they reached a peak of popularity, perhaps not coincidentally, in the years just before Tolkien was at King Edward's School cordially disliking Shakespeare, and a second even higher peak in 1929 when Tolkien was 37. It's precisely the sort of turn of phrase that a young man as alive to language as Tolkien would have loved. His use of it in the middle of the 1950s and 1960s show that it stuck with him, becoming one of those words or phrases we pick up in youth by which younger generations can date us. Rather like the phrase 'haters gonna hate' will be some day. (See the charts below.)

So the context and the phrasing of Tolkien's remark to Auden about Shakespeare encourages us to be circumspect in assessing Tolkien's opinion of Shakespeare and in deciding if his views as a teenager bore much resemblance to his views as a mature scholar and author decades later. So what can we say about young Tolkien's response to Shakespeare? What evidence do we actually have about his feelings as a very young man and later? 

Most famously, perhaps, he found the manner in which Birnam Wood came to Dunsinane rather disappointing and unimaginative, and I have to say it is a rather prosaic way for a prophecy to be fulfilled. But not every prophecy is punctuated by a cockcrow. In the very letter to Auden quoted above Tolkien also says:

Their part [i.e., the Ents] in the story is due, I think, to my bitter disappointment and disgust from schooldays with the shabby use made in Shakespeare of the coming of 'Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill': I longed to devise a setting in which the trees might really march to war.

In On Fairy-stories(¶ 07) and elsewhere in the Letters Tolkien also denounces Shakespeare along with Michael Drayton for the part they played in making the elves into 'a long line of flower-fairies and fluttering sprites with antennae that I so disliked as a child, and which my children in their turn detested.' While we might find it tempting to associate his 'dislike' here with the 'dislike' he felt as a schoolboy, on the evidence we would be wrong to do so. For, aside from the decades separating the schoolboy from the scholar, we have evidence that young Tolkien did not find diminutive fairies as objectionable as mature Tolkien did. 

For example, he was apparently quite taken with a performance of Peter Pan he attended in April 1910 and very much wished that Edith could have seen it with him (Scull and Hammond, The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide 2017 vol. 1, p. 23). Then there is his poem Goblin Feet, written in 1915 while an undergraduate at Oxford, a poem which very much partakes of the Victorian fairy genre for which he later blames Shakespeare (Letters no. 131, p. 143; no. 151, p. 185). In 1971 he said of Goblin Feet that he 'wished the unhappy little thing, representing all that I came (so soon after) to fervently dislike, could be buried for ever.' Finally, the first fairies whom Eriol meets in the Book of Lost Tales (ca. 1918) are tiny beings who live in a tiny cottage, which he must grow smaller to enter (I.14, 235; II.25-27). 

The evidence from his youth is thus consistent with the testimony of his old age (from 1971), and not with his statement in On Fairy-stories which he might have made for rhetorical effect. Note how the citation here of his children's dislike of these fairies serves to confirm the correctness of his own. Note, too, how again in ¶ 107 Tolkien uses the opinion of his children to corroborate his assessment, citing the 'nausea' his children felt at the opening of the play Toad of Toad Hall as proof that the attempt to dramatize this fairy-story was misguided. So when we read in On Fairy-stories that he 'so disliked' fairies of this sort 'as a child' OFS ¶ 07), we may doubt that he is remembering the details correctly. It is also true and only fair to both Shakespeare and Tolkien to point out that in the sentence in which Tolkien avows this dislike since childhood, he is speaking specifically of Michael Drayton's Nymphidia, though Shakespeare is paired with Drayton in the previous sentence.

There is one other moment in Tolkien's days at King Edward's School I want to look at before moving on. In April of 1911, his last spring before going up to Oxford, Tolkien took part in the school's annual Open Debate, the topic of which was a motion that Shakespeare's plays were written, not by Shakespeare, but by Francis Bacon. Tolkien argued in favor of the motion. We need to bear two things in mind here. First, in debating societies debaters often argue positions they don't personally agree with as a means of strengthening their skills, so his arguing for the authorship of Francis Bacon tells us little or nothing. The topics of the debate, moreover, were often chosen precisely because they were controversial. At King Edward's in Tolkien's time the Debating Society considered subjects variously serious, ridiculous, and offensive: slavery vs freedom; whether school holidays should be abolished; whether the Norman Conquest was a good thing; freedom of the press; war vs international arbitration; private vs public support of drama; tennis vs cricket; whether the Chinese and Japanese were a threat to Europe; women's suffrage; public corporal punishment; whether 'the vulgar are the really happy'; whether 'the heroes of antiquity have been much overrated; or even whether 'the Debating Society does more harm than good' (Scull and Hammond, The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide 2017 vol. 1, pp. 18-30 passim).

Second, Tolkien's arguments, like the arguments of most who believe that someone other than William Shakespeare wrote the plays published under his name, rest on the assumption that the plays are much too good to have been written by someone with Shakespeare's education and background. In fact, people who dispute Shakespeare's authorship commonly love the plays themselves. Sir Derek Jacobi, for example, one of the great Shakespearean actors of our time, has prominently rejected Shakespeare's authorship of the plays. So, too, in the debate Tolkien criticized the quality of the man, not of the plays, and if he had seriously espoused this position, far from suggesting a cordial dislike of Shakespeare, it would argue that he admired the plays. His participation in the Debating Society at King Edward's and the position he argued in this debate tells us little or nothing about his opinion of Shakespeare and his works in 1911.

As we saw above, in On Fairy-stories Tolkien held Shakespeare partly responsible for the pixification of the Elves, which led him to wish 'a murrain on Will Shakespeare and his damned cobwebs' in a footnote to his letter to Milton Waldman in 1951 (Letters no. 131, p. 143) and which in a 1954 letter he called a 'disastrous debasement' and 'unforgiveable' (Letters no. 151, p. 185). While there seems no reason to doubt or fault his frustration with Shakespeare on this subject, we might wonder whether his use of 'unforgiveable' suggests that the idea of forgiveness had been weighed and rejected. Do we call something 'unforgiveable' otherwise? There is also reason to note that it is a very narrow criticism of Shakespeare on a matter that became more important to Tolkien as the years passed, by which I mean the representation of the fantastic in literature or drama.

This of course brings us back to On Fairy-stories, where he argues that drama is the wrong vehicle for fantasy. Taking the witches in Macbeth as his example, he points out that they are 'tolerable' on the page, but 'almost intolerable' on the stage.

[71] In Macbeth, when it is read, I find the witches tolerable: they have a narrative function and some hint of dark significance; though they are vulgarized, poor things of their kind. They are almost intolerable in the play. They would be quite intolerable, if I were not fortified by some memory of them as they are in the story as read. I am told that I should feel differently if I had the mind of the period, with its witch-hunts and witch-trials. But that is to say: if I regarded the witches as possible, indeed likely, in the Primary World; in other words, if they ceased to be “Fantasy.” That argument concedes the point. To be dissolved, or to be degraded, is the likely fate of Fantasy when a dramatist tries to use it, even such a dramatist as Shakespeare. Macbeth is indeed a work by a playwright who ought, at least on this occasion, to have written a story, if he had the skill or patience for that art.

This is no criticism of Shakespeare at all. Tolkien's whole point here is that 'even such a dramatist as Shakespeare' was 'likely' to fail to represent fantasy successfully on the stage. Who could succeed, if he could not? The proper mode for fantasy is narrative, i.e., a story, not drama. Tolkien's perspective here is also consistent with, and may well follow ultimately from, his boyhood dissatisfaction with Shakespeare's handling of Birnam Wood.

If we turn now to a letter Tolkien wrote to his son, Christopher, in July 1944, we shall see more of his reflections on Shakespeare and the difference between the bard on the page and the bard on the stage (Letters no. 76, p. 88; italics added). 

Plain news is on the airgraph; but the only event worthy of talk was the performance of Hamlet which I had been to just before I wrote last. I was full of it then, but the cares of the world have soon wiped away the impression. But it emphasised more strongly than anything I have ever seen the folly of reading Shakespeare (and annotating him in the study), except as a concomitant of seeing his plays acted. It was a very good performance, with a young rather fierce Hamlet; it was played fast without cuts; and came out as a very exciting play. Could one only have seen it without ever having read it or knowing the plot, it would have been terrific. It was well produced except for a bit of bungling over the killing of Polonius. But to my surprise the part that came out as the most moving, almost intolerably so, was the one that in reading I always found a bore: the scene of mad Ophelia singing her snatches.

Tolkien quite clearly enjoyed the play itself immensely. His comments on the performances of Hamlet and Ophelia make clear the emotional impact 'seeing his plays acted' had on him. Even his minor criticism of the killing of Polonius addresses the production of the scene, not Shakespeare's handling of it. It should be entirely obvious from the sentence I've put in italics, however, that what Tolkien disliked was not Shakespeare the playwright or his works, but rather an approach to studying his plays, namely reading them without also watching them. I daresay that many, or perhaps most of us, know this approach well from our own school days, and may have, at the time, disliked it cordially.

We also know that Tolkien attended other performances of Shakespeare. Besides this Hamlet (with John Gielgud in the title role, by the way), we can reasonably infer from his comments, contrasting the witches in Macbeth on the page versus on the stage, that he saw that as well at some point before he wrote On Fairy-stories. His attendance is also attested at Henry VIII, Twelfth Night, and, accompanied by C. S. Lewis, A Midsummer Night's Dream (Scull and Hammond, The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide 2017 vol. 1, pp. 252, 397, 426). Writing to his brother, Warnie, on 18 February 1940, Lewis tells him about 'the really excellent performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream which Tolkien and I saw at the Playhouse.' He says nothing about Tolkien's opinion, but would Tolkien have been shy about sharing it with Lewis (or Lewis with his brother), had it been greatly different?

Finally comes a passage in one of Tolkien's letters in which he places Shakespeare in the most exalted company (no. 156, p. 201):

There are, I suppose, always defects in any large-scale work of art; and especially in those of literary form that are founded on an earlier matter which is put to new uses – like Homer, or Beowulf, or Virgil, or Greek or Shakespearean tragedy! In which class, as a class not as a competitor, The Lord of the Rings really falls though it is only founded on the author's own first draft! I think the way in which Gandalf's return is presented is a defect.

Note here the two exclamation points. The very idea that the works of these authors can be represented as having defects is to be punctuated with raised eyebrows, as is his denial that he has the cheek to consider The Lord of the Rings in competition with their works. Yes, even Homer and Shakespeare nod, and can err in their treatment of earlier material (the witches in Macbeth, for example), but they are still among the very great and the only way in which his work can compare to theirs is in its reuse of 'earlier matter.'

So it seems fairly clear that Tolkien's attitude towards Shakespeare is not what many often take it to be on the basis of his 'cordial dislike' or his frustration with the coming of Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill. Drama, Tolkien felt, was not well suited to fantasy, since it was already something of a fantasy to begin with; and the study of Shakespeare on the page alone is folly. Proper study of the plays requires both reading and viewing. Tom Shippey has said in Author of the Century that Tolkien was 'guardedly respectful' of Shakespeare. That is the least of it.

For further reading, see, e.g, 

• Michael D. C. Drout's article in Tolkien Studies 1 (2004) Tolkien's Prose Style and its Literary and Rhetorical Effects 137-63
• Janet Croft's Tolkien and Shakespeare: essays on shared themes and language (McFarland) 2007.

  

Hope Shall Come Again: 'The Choices of Master Samwise' and 'The Children of Húrin'

In 'The Choices of Master Samwise', when Sam believes Frodo to be dead, his anguish leads him to contemplate his own death, by suicide:

He looked on the bright point of the sword. He thought of the places behind where there was a black brink and an empty fall into nothingness. There was no escape that way. That was to do nothing, not even to grieve.

(TT 4.x.732)

When the orcs arrive in the pass and discover Frodo's dead body (as Sam still believes), Sam again imagines his own death:

How many can I kill before they get me? They’ll see the flame of the sword, as soon as I draw it, and they’ll get me sooner or later. I wonder if any song will ever mention it: How Samwise fell in the High Pass and made a wall of bodies round his master. No, no song. Of course not, for the Ring’ll be found, and there’ll be no more songs.

(TT 4.x.735)

In these moments one of the Great Tales of the First Age resonates within Sam's soul. Unlike the many explicit evocations of the Tale of Beren and Lúthien in The Lord of the Rings, the allusions here are far more obscure, to the Tale of the Children of Húrin, where Túrin fell upon his sword, where his sister, Nienor, leaped to her death; and where their father, Húrin, made the heroic last stand to end all heroic last stands. To catch these allusions, however, requires detailed knowledge of a Tale never mentioned at all in The Lord of the Rings. Its two chief figures, Húrin and his son Túrin are scarcely more than names on a list of elf-friends mentioned by Elrond (FR 2.ii.270). Until The Silmarillion was published in 1977, moreover, no other information was available. We don't even know that Húrin and Túrin are father and son. Húrin and his family might as well have been the cats of Queen Beruthiel. Their story seemed just as unknowable. 

What's more surprising is that, as far as I have been able to tell, no one spotted these allusions even after the publication of The Silmarillion. Despite multiple versions of the story appearing across the decades in Unfinished Tales, The Book of Lost Tales I, The Lays of Beleriand, The Shaping of Middle-earth, The Lost Road, The Children of Húrin, and elsewhere.

Part of what we see here is Tolkien's craft. He knows that he can draw on the mythic power of the Tale of the Children of Húrin without needing to draw our attention to the allusions by introducing explanations that would distract from the moment and the momentum of the story; and he can draw on this power in this way precisely because it is mythic and therefore transcends the particular details of the moment. What we see here is yet more evidence for how important these Great Tales are to the narrative and to the characters within it. The connection between the Tale of Frodo and Sam and the larger Tales of which theirs is a part does not need to be made explicit to be effective.

Part of it, finally, is that Sam is on the knife-edge of Tragedy here. If he makes a mistake in his choices, all is lost for him, and all is lost for Middle-earth. Sam, moreover, believing his master to be dead, already sees himself as in a story that has turned tragic. The Tale of the Children of Húrin is the tale for this crisis rather than the Tale of Beren and Lúthien because it is a Tragedy, and Beren and Lúthien, for all of its tragic moments, is a fairy-story that goes beyond sorrow into joy. We talk about Tolkien and fairy-stories far more often than we do about Tolkien and Tragedy. But in On Fairy-stories Tolkien speaks of the two types of story together. Each helps him define the other. He says:

At least I would say that Tragedy is the true form of Drama, its highest function; but the opposite is true of Fairy-story. Since we do not appear to possess a word that expresses this opposite—I will call it Eucatastrophe. The eucatastrophic tale is the true form of fairy-tale, and its highest function.

(OFS ¶ 99)

And if the catastrophe that marks a Tragedy cleanses us or purges us by means of fear and pity, then we can see the parallel between Drama and Fairy-stories even more clearly. For the eucatastrophe that is the 'true form' and 'highest function' of a fairy tale cleanses us through Escape, Recovery, and Consolation. It includes the renewed clarity of 'vision' we gain through Recovery (OFS ¶ 83-84). but goes beyond it by allowing a 'vision' of a transcendent reality (OFS ¶ 103).

There is more to be explored here, which I don't have time for right now. For example, an essential aspect of the situation Sam finds himself in here is the battle he has with Shelob directly before he comes to believe Frodo dead. For the narrator there names both Beren, the fairy-tale hero who also fought giant spiderlike monsters, and Túrin, the tragic hero who slew a dragon by stabbing him from below only to learn terrible truths about his own life in doing so. Sam of course is neither of these great heroes, sons of the chieftains of their peoples, and further reflection on these passages may well help us more deeply understanding of On Fairy-stories, The Lord of the Rings, and how the dynamic balance of Tragedy and Eucatastrophe fundamentally shapes Tolkien's Secondary World.

___________________________

If anybody knows of another discussion of these particular allusions to The Children of Húrin in The Choices of Master Samwise, please do let me know. I would be eager to see it. 

Fear in a handful of dust: reflections in Frodo's dusty mirror (FR 1.iii.68)

‘I shall get myself a bit into training, too,’ he said, looking at himself in a dusty mirror in the half-empty hall. He had not done any strenuous walking for a long time, and the reflection looked rather flabby, he thought. 

(FR 1.iii.68)

Anton Chekhov famously advised younger writers that the details they introduce early in their works are not to be taken lightly. A loaded gun onstage in the first act must be used before the end. We call this Chekhov's Gun. That he also famously broke his own rule in The Cherry Orchard need not detract from lesson. For he did not break his rule lightly. Donald Rayfield has noted that the failure of the gun to go off in The Cherry Orchard reflects the thematic failure of the characters to do anything.* Great writers are masters of the rules, even their own. 

The detail of course need not be a loaded gun. It can just as well be a mirror. If an author calls attention to a mirror, whether actual or enchanted, the reader should pay attention. We would naturally expect more from an enchanted mirror. In Harry Potter, for example, the Mirror of Erised reveals the greatest desire of those who look into it, which tells a great deal about their character. The Mirror of Galadriel is more challenging, with its visions of past, present, and future, and who knows which is which and who is who; and as with all things prophetic, sometimes the visions glimpsed come true only because the one who sees them tries to stop them. 

Whether ordinary or enchanted, however, mirrors in stories present not only reflections of, but reflections on, those who look into them. Naturals mirrors, bodies of clear, still water can also reveal whether we are a Narcissus or Durin when we look into them. Windows, too, can open onto new sights or old sights made as new, as when Frodo has his blindfold removed in Lothlórien:

The others cast themselves down upon the fragrant grass, but Frodo stood awhile still lost in wonder. It seemed to him that he had stepped through a high window that looked on a vanished world. A light was upon it for which his language had no name. All that he saw was shapely, but the shapes seemed at once clear cut, as if they had been first conceived and drawn at the uncovering of his eyes, and ancient as if they had endured for ever. He saw no colour but those he knew, gold and white and blue and green, but they were fresh and poignant, as if he had at that moment first perceived them and made for them names new and wonderful. In winter here no heart could mourn for summer or for spring. No blemish or sickness or deformity could be seen in anything that grew upon the earth. On the land of Lórien there was no stain. 

(FR 2.vi.350)

With 'no stain', no blindfold, with nothing to come between the one perceiving and the thing perceived we see a different world. Tolkien spoke of this 'clear view' of the world and its importance in his essay On Fairy-stories:

Recovery (which includes return and renewal of health) is a re-gaining—regaining of a clear view. I do not say “seeing things as they are” and involve myself with the philosophers, though I might venture to say “seeing things as we are (or were) meant to see them”—as things apart from ourselves. We need, in any case, to clean our windows; so that the things seen clearly may be freed from the drab blur of triteness or familiarity—from possessiveness. Of all faces those of our familiares are the ones both most difficult to play fantastic tricks with, and most difficult really to see with fresh attention, perceiving their likeness and unlikeness: that they are faces, and yet unique faces. This triteness is really the penalty of “appropriation”: the things that are trite, or (in a bad sense) familiar, are the things that we have appropriated, legally or mentally. We say we know them. They have become like the things which once attracted us by their glitter, or their colour, or their shape, and we laid hands on them, and then locked them in our hoard, acquired them, and acquiring ceased to look at them.  

(OFS ¶ 83)

So when we see the mirror in the hall at Bag End and it is dusty, both the mirror and the dust upon it are details we should not take lightly. Frodo's grimy mirror is as much a signal as Chekhov's Gun. The dust on the mirror, moreover, is more problematic than dirt on a window. For it affects the light reflected twice, both before and after it reaches the mirror. The image is thus distorted in its creation and in its perception. The dust here invites us to note more than that Frodo is less fastidious housekeeper than his uncle was. (But, really, what would Bilbo say?). So what is Frodo not seeing as he was meant to see it?

He notices he's carrying some extra weight around his middle, which given his age is nothing unusual. Nor is it surprising that he looks forward to walking some of those pounds off on the journey he is about to set out on. What he is not seeing is something that his neighbors clearly have noted despite the weight he's put on, namely, that at fifty he looks the same as he had seventeen years earlier when Bilbo left, like 'a robust and energetic hobbit just out of his tweens'. He was showing the same 'queer' 'preservation' which Bilbo had shown (FR1.ii.42-43). He knows all about this particular effect of the Ring. He also knows that he must leave the Shire in order to save it and get rid of the Ring. That is the entire point of the journey he is about to embark on. Yet when he looks in the mirror, he does not even notice how young he looks, let alone make a connection between his youthful appearance and its 'preservation' by the Ring. 

The next time he looks in a mirror, in Rivendell, he will at last pick up on how young he looks as well as how much thinner he looks: 

Looking in a mirror he was startled to see a much thinner reflection of himself than he remembered: it looked remarkably like the young nephew of Bilbo who used to go tramping with his uncle in the Shire; but the eyes looked out at him thoughtfully. ‘Yes, you have seen a thing or two since you last peeped out of a looking-glass,’ he said to his reflection. ‘But now for a merry meeting!’ He stretched out his arms and whistled a tune. 

(FR 2.i.225)

Although Aragorn had rebuked him for joking about becoming so thin that he would turn into a wraith (FR 1.xi.184), he still sees only a little more than he had when he looked in the mirror at Bag End. Although he has in fact only just barely escaped being turned into a wraith by the Nazgûl, Frodo still makes no connection between his appearance and the Ring. He is surprised and, I think, clearly pleased by his young, trim appearance. Yet there is also a distance between him and the reflection. 'It' does not look like him, but like 'the young nephew of Bilbo', and it is not 'his eyes' that look out at him, but 'the eyes.' He addresses 'it' in the second-person, as people sometime do, but, while he whistles a tune and anticipates an evening of mirth, he leaves the eyes and their thoughtful look behind. By contrast in Bag End, he had looked at 'himself' in the glass, and not a 'reflection of himself', and had spoken to himself in the first-person as he did so. Even if he now sees the remarkable preservation which he did not see before, his identification with the reflection is less. 

Considering what else Frodo and others see and how they see it on this Frodo's first day conscious in Rivendell will help us understand his interactions with his reflections. In Gandalf's conversation with Frodo that morning the complexities of perceiving the world and those in it accurately come to the fore several times. These range from simple matters of misperception based on misconceptions -- such as the moral and intellectual qualities of Men or the truth about Strider and the Rangers -- to more recondite questions of the horizons of mundane reality -- the visibility of the Black Riders to Frodo and the light shining from Glorfindel, whose worlds overlap with, but are not perceptually the same as, the everyday world.

Near the end of their conversation Gandalf 'took a good look at Frodo': 'there seemed to be little wrong with him. But to the wizard's eye there was a faint change, just a hint as it were of transparency....' Yet the subtle eye of Gandalf is uncertain what to make of this 'transparency.' He concedes that such transparency is not unexpected. In addition to the grave wound inflicted on him by the Morgul knife, which was causing him to fade into the world of the Ringwraiths (FR 2.i.219, 222), Frodo is a mortal who possesses a Ring of Power and has used it more than once to become invisible. One of the first lessons Gandalf tried to impart to Frodo was that mortals who use such rings fade (FR 1.ii.47).

As a result, Gandalf found himself not quite certain what the hobbit would come to in the end. While he expected that Frodo would not come 'to evil', he qualified that notion with 'I think', followed by the concession that not even Elrond could 'foretell' what would become of Frodo. (And foretelling presupposes foreseeing.) His final thought, that Frodo 'may become like a glass filled with clear light for eyes to see that can' sounds much more hopeful, and it is, but it must nevertheless be read in the context of Gandalf's just expressed uncertainties, which his use of 'may become' shows to be unresolved because the future he hoped for is unrealized so far. If Frodo is filled with light now, Gandalf doesn't seem to see it -- even if Sam apparently can (TT 4.iv.651-52). The wizard's immediate pronouncement to Frodo -- 'you look splendid' -- further emphasizes his private reservations by disassociating them from his outward certainties.

That same evening Frodo's unexpected 'merry meeting' with Bilbo takes a very dark turn when Bilbo asks to see the Ring and then reaches out to touch it. As he does so, Frodo suddenly sees Bilbo as through 'a shadow', and his beloved uncle appears to him to be a Gollum-like creature whom he wished to strike. What Bilbo sees in Frodo's face at this moment is never described, but it was clearly more than a thoughtful look in his eyes. His reaction makes plain that what he saw reflected in Frodo's face brought home to him an understanding of the Ring which years of badgering by Gandalf and his own nearly violent clash with Gandalf the night he left Bag End had been unable to accomplish. 

Bilbo looked quickly at Frodo’s face and passed his hand across his eyes. ‘I understand now,’ he said. ‘Put it away! I am sorry: sorry you have come in for this burden; sorry about everything. Don’t adventures ever have an end? I suppose not. Someone else always has to carry on the story. Well, it can’t be helped. I wonder if it’s any good trying to finish my book? But don’t let’s worry about it now – let’s have some real News! Tell me all about the Shire!’ 

(FR 2.i.232)

We see a very different Bilbo here than the one who argued fiercely with Gandalf about the Ring back in the Shire. That Bilbo had laid his hand on the hilt of his sword when Gandalf insisted he leave the Ring behind. That Bilbo, even after he backed down and let go of his sword, tried to suggest that Gandalf was the problem (FR 1.i.34): 'I don't know what has come over you, Gandalf'. This Bilbo passes his hand in front of his eyes, as if to wipe away what he has seen, and backs down, not because he has been intimidated, but because he understands. He says he is sorry three times, and in this moment at last sees the matter of the Ring as a burden, which only a minute earlier he had made light of: 'Fancy that ring of mine causing such a disturbance!' (FR 2.i.232). His reaction here has far more in common with the 'sudden understanding' and the pity he felt for Gollum beneath the Misty Mountains long ago. True Hobbit that he is, Bilbo then deflects the burden of the moment with levity and an appeal for all the gossip from home, thus converting this sharp instant back into the sort of a 'merry meeting' Frodo had looked forward to as he walked whistling away from the looking-glass in which he could not quite see as clearly as Bilbo just has.

The dust on the mirror at Bag End, obscuring Frodo's image of himself and skewing his perception is the metaphorical herald of the shadow that falls between him and Bilbo here. He's looked through this shadow before, however, as we can see in The Flight to the Ford, when he was fading because of the wound inflicted at Weathertop. It obscured the faces of his friends during the day and by the night it made the world seem 'less pale and empty' (FR 1.xii.210, 211). Yet metaphorical or not, it still obscures his view and hints at the influence the Ring already has over him, much like his inability to throw the Ring even into a fire that he knew could not harm it and his reluctance to let Gandalf touch it. 

But it is more than this. For, at the far end of this spectrum of occlusion, we find the Eye of Sauron looking at Frodo out of the last mirror he looks into, and the Eye also cannot see what it is searching for, cannot descry what it is most important to it without a blunder by the Ring-bearer, cannot read the hearts of others, because for all its watchfulness it is covered in the glaze of its own possessiveness and measures all other things by its own desires. It is framed by and filled with emptiness.

But suddenly the Mirror went altogether dark, as dark as if a hole had opened in the world of sight, and Frodo looked into emptiness. In the black abyss there appeared a single Eye that slowly grew, until it filled nearly all the Mirror. So terrible was it that Frodo stood rooted, unable to cry out or to withdraw his gaze. The Eye was rimmed with fire, but was itself glazed, yellow as a cat’s, watchful and intent, and the black slit of its pupil opened on a pit, a window into nothing. 

(FR 2.vii.364, italics added)

After the crisis passes in Bilbo's argument with Gandalf about the Ring, Bilbo also passed his hand over his eyes as if clearing something from his vision, and spoke of the feeling that the Ring was an eye looking at him. He wanted just to put it on and disappear. In reply Gandalf tells him to 'stop possessing it' (FR 1.i.33). Such possessiveness gave the Ring 'far too much hold on you. Let it go! And then you can go yourself, and be free.' (FR 1.i.33). And it is of course in giving it up that he became as free of the Ring as he ever could be. 

Possessiveness, Tolkien tells us in the passage of On Fairy-stories quoted above, keeps us from seeing things 'as we are (or were) meant to see them'. As he says, we find things attractive because of 'their glitter, or their colour, or their shape', things we then appropriate and possess like a dragon brooding upon their hoard, things we then stop looking at because the possession has become what matters. Recall how Frodo looks at the Ring: 

It now appeared plain and smooth, without mark or device that he could see. The gold looked very fair and pure, and Frodo thought how rich and beautiful was its colour, how perfect was its roundness. It was an admirable thing and altogether precious. 

(FR 1.ii.60)

Or how Déagol 'gloated over' it, if ever so briefly:

And behold! when he washed the mud away, there in his hand lay a beautiful golden ring; and it shone and glittered in the sun, so that his heart was glad. 

(FR 1.ii.52)

An ordinary person who has 'appropriated' and 'possessed' an ordinary thing in the sense Tolkien means these words in On Fairy-stories would need to experience the Recovery of a 'clear view' which fairy stories offer before he can see that thing 'as we are (or were) meant to see them.' Even so, to shake a person free of such possessiveness might take some doing, or so Tolkien's likening the possessor to a dragon sitting on a hoard suggests. Viewing these passages alongside the description of possessiveness in On Fairy-stories, I think we can safely say that we see as we were meant to see them, and perhaps even as they really are. Possessiveness may not blind the possessor (though it very well might), but it obscures their view, whether we think of it metaphorically as dust on the mirror, dirt on a window, or a shadow between familiar faces which we find we no longer know. 

The power of the Ring complicates matters, however. Its color, shape, glitter, and beauty are a small part of its allure, yet it is not 'so small a thing' as Boromir calls it when about to succumb to its pull (FR 2.x.397-98). To speak more precisely, the power inherent in the Ring captures its possessor, just as the gravity of a more massive body captures a less massive body. The possessor is possessed in turn, and so enslaved, and so devoured. The possessiveness powered by the Ring does 'play fantastic tricks' with the faces of our familiares and sets them friends against each other. Frodo sees not just Bilbo as a Gollum-like creature, but Sam as an Orc (RK 6.i.911-12; cf. 6.iii.936). Sméagol murders Déagol; Bilbo threatens Gandalf with a sword; Frodo does the same to Sam. The thirty-three year old face fifty year old Frodo sees in the mirror should be both familiar and not startlingly, not remarkably, but disturbingly strange. He should see its 'likeness and unlikeness' to the face he knows as that of Frodo Baggins. He should know it isn't right, but the dust and shadows of the possessiveness that comes with the Ring prevents him from having a 'clear view.' 

As Gandalf thought when he looked at Frodo that morning at Rivendell, 'he is not half through yet.' By the time he is all the way through, he will be more in need of Recovery, of the clear view, the fairy tale can bring. But as Frodo learns tales don't always end well for those inside them. Whatever glimpse of joy the eucatastrophe of Mount Doom may bring the reader, it brings Frodo consolation for the loss of the thing that possessed him. He must leave the tale, and seek his Recovery elsewhere, where 'the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise' (RK 6.ix.1020).

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* The wikipedia article on Chekhov's Gun quotes three examples of Chekhov giving this advice, and provides the citations for The Cherry Orchard and the work of Donald Rayfield. I will confirm these citations at the first opportunity.

Star Trek: Picard offers us a splendid example of Chekhov's Gun. In the fourth episode of the second season a gun hangs above the mantel in Chateau Picard and in the fifth episode one of the characters uses it. Extra points here since this also counts as an allusion of Pavel Chekov of Star Trek: The Original Series.

QED: 'I will show you fear in a handful of dust.'

'When we are enchanted' -- Mortal Men, Arda, and Faërie

The Light of Valinor © Ted Nasmith

In her paper, 'The Perilous Realm: Faërie and the Numinous in Tolkien', presented at Mythmoot VI this weekend, Emily Strand discussed this familiar passage from On Fairy-stories:

Now, though I have only touched (wholly inadequately) on elves and fairies, I must turn back; for I have digressed from my proper theme: fairy-stories. I said the sense “stories about fairies” was too narrow. It is too narrow, even if we reject the diminutive size, for fairy-stories are not in normal English usage stories about fairies or elves, but stories about Fairy, that is Faerie, the realm or state in which fairies have their being. Faerie contains many things besides elves and fays, and besides dwarfs, witches, trolls, giants, or dragons: it holds the seas, the sun, the moon, the sky; and the earth, and all things that are in it: tree and bird, water and stone, wine and bread, and ourselves, mortal men, when we are enchanted

The question arose for me immediately: why do only 'mortal men' require enchantment to be 'contained' in Faërie? While I had written before about the mortal experience of Faërie in Middle-earth, I had never asked myself this question as far as I could recall. What came to mind at once was a passage from The Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth in Morgoth's Ring. There Finrod says to Andreth (MR 315):

'Now we Eldar are your kinsmen, and your friends also (if you will believe it), and we have observed you already through three lives of Men with love and concern and much thought. Of this then we are certain without debate, or else all our wisdom is vain: the fëar of Men, though close akin indeed to the fëar of the Quendi, are yet not the same. For strange as we deem it, we see clearly that the fëar of Men are not, as are ours, confined to Arda, nor is Arda their home.               

'Can you deny it? Now we Eldar do not deny that ye love Arda and all that is therein (in so far as ye are free from the Shadow) maybe even as greatly as do we. Yet otherwise. Each of our kindreds perceives Arda differently, and appraises its beauties in different mode and degree. How shall I say it? To me the difference seems like that between one who visits a strange country, and abides there a while (but need not), and one who has lived in that land always (and must). To the former all things that he sees are new and strange, and in that degree lovable. To the other all things are familiar, the only things that are, his own, and in that degree precious.' 

Fëa (pl. fëar) is the Quenya word for 'soul' or 'spirit'. Arda neither 'confines' the spirits of Men, nor is it their home. Men also seem to be the only creature or thing in Arda not naturally a part of Faërie. We alone require an enchantment to be 'contained' there. When viewed together, these two passages suggest that it is the nature of the fëar of Men which makes an enchantment necessary. They also suggest that Arda and Faërie once completely overlapped each other or were in fact the same place. Why would this no longer be so? The inevitable fading of Faërie with the coming of Men is part of it, especially as quickened by the removal of the Blessed Realm from Arda at the end of the Second Age.

These are just preliminary thoughts that I mean to follow up on, but I wanted to put them out there for now.

Quickened to Full Life by War (OFS ¶ 56) -- Living the Iliad

Julian Grenfell

Julian Grenfell was a poet and soldier of the Great War, who embraced the idea of battle and the war even as he also sneered at the lives of Staff Officers safely away from the trenches.  The moment before he died in hospital of a wound suffered at the front, a ray of sunlight came through his window. Grenfell said 'Phoebus Apollo', his last words. Within three months the war also claimed his brother. His mother received a letter of condolence from a family friend, in which the writer evokes both Christ and Apollo in the hope of offering some consolation:

How often Christ's cry upon the cross re-echoes through one's aching soul; that most desolate and piercing cry the saddest ever uttered in this sad world.... We do not know how God answered it; but we believe that, in spite of cruelty and sin and death, the answer is peace. I think the answer to you comes through the testimony, the living proof, of those most glorious boys, who never looked back, and went to death like Bridegrooms, like Phoebus Apollo running his course; Phoebus, who sent his shafts to Julian in his last moments on earth, and was answered by the flicker of his eyes; that gleam from Julian which will speak to you, in the long hours of waiting and darkness, of the immortality of the soul and the deathlessness of love.  

(Vandiver 204-205)

In her exceptional book, Stand in the Trench, Achilles: Classical Receptions in British Poetry of the Great War, Elizabeth Vandiver comments on the 'remarkable ... unproblematized, matter-of-fact manner' in which the letter joins Christianity and Greek Mythology. It reflects the society from which the poetry of the Great War sprang, regardless of whether the poet was Grenfell or Brooke, Rosenberg or Owen:

In a cultural situation in which the elder generation chose to phrase its condolence letters and its exhortations in such terms, it is small wonder that poets who were themselves soldiers employed a similar amalgamation of Christian and pagan imagery and concepts, in which the idea of the soldiers as new Christ, who lays down his life for his friends and his country, is inextricably intertwined with classical exempla.  Some poets invoked not just classical allusions but the Olympians by name, and in a tone that would imply utter sincerity did we not know that the soldiers of 1914 were nominally, and often much more than nominally, Christians, and their poetry is permeated with invocations of Jehovah and Christ. Yet, although of course no British poet (soldier or civilian) writing in 1914-18 would have claimed to 'believe in' the Olympian gods in the sense of assuming those gods' objective reality, pagan imagery of the Olympians and the heroes is inextricably interwoven with Christian imagery. The Christian soldier must fight for justice and the protection of the weak; it is his Christian duty -- and Zeus and the heroes of Troy will spur him on to do so.

(Vandiver 206)

Clearly for Greek mythology to wield such imaginative power over these poets and their contemporaries, it must have been as alive as their faith was, even if not as objectively real. It is what we know, what we love and believe in, and what we find important that help us parse our experiences, all of them of course, but most noticeably those that shock our innocence and challenge the way we have seen things so far. Not long ago I wrote about C.S. Lewis and asked what it must have been like to go off to The Great War with a head full of Homer, as so many of his generation did. It was in discussing that post with Connie Ruzich that I learned about Vandiver's book, which explores precisely all the different ways in which British poets of The Great War used the imaginative tool given them by their knowledge of Homer and the Classics to grapple with the war and its meaning.

In that book, moreover, I came across a poem I am not sure I'd seen before.  However that may be, the poem now struck me in a new way:

Deaf to the music, once a boy
    His Homer, crib in hand, had read;
Now near the windy plains of Troy,
    He lives an Iliad instead.

Of these lines by Edward Shillito -- and I have not yet been able to ascertain whether they comprise the entire poem, or are but a selection, since the book in which they appear is hard to come by (road trip!) -- Vandiver aptly remarks:

Far from saying that the actual experience of real war shows the boy how insufficient literature in general and Homer in particular are, Shillito's poem implies instead that the actual experience of war shows the boy precisely how real Homer is. The contrast is not between reading the Iliad and experiencing actual war but between reading the Iliad and experiencing the Iliad. Thus the Iliad is assumed to occupy both realms -- active and contemplative -- simultaneously. 

(246, italics original)

Shillito's verses and Vandiver's observations on them together brought to my mind remarks by another veteran of The Great War, who had a similar experience, but with a different mythology. In his essay On Fairy-stories, J. R. R. Tolkien wrote:

Poetry I discovered much later in Latin and Greek, and especially through being made to try and translate English verse into classical verse. A real taste for fairy-stories was wakened by philology on the threshold of manhood, and quickened to full life by war. 

(OFS ¶ 56)

Indeed, one might well say that for the lad in Shillito's poem, the Iliad was 'quickened to full life by war.'  While I don't for a moment imagine that Tolkien needed a crib of Homer, Beowulf, or any other text, I find the parallel between his statement about fairy stories and Shillito's about Homer striking. Both chose to represent the effect of war as a bringing to full life to something not so before. If Shillito's young man found himself suddenly in the Iliad, as it were, Tolkien had already started down the road to Faërie. Philology had already given him the taste for fairy stories, but only the experience of war brought that taste 'to full life'.

It's certainly easy enough to see how the chaos, gore, and dismemberment that Grendel visited on Heorot every night could have become more vivid to a young subaltern on the Somme in 1916; and how the resistless doom that stalked Kullervo might have seemed more than just a tragic story to an officer with a life expectancy of six weeks (as was the common belief; cf. Tolkien, Letters, no. 43). Even many years after he wrote On Fairy-stories Tolkien still spoke of that time in words that convey a feeling of powerlessness in the face of something far more vast: 'to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918 all but one of my close friends was dead' (FR xxiv). Tolkien being Tolkien, we should probably allow that by 'involved' he means far more than a dull variant of 'include'. In Middle English 'envolve' means 'envelop', as in John Lydgate's Troy Book: 'Vnhappyly with hap þei were envoluyd' (TB 2.3223): 'To their misfortune they were by fortune enveloped.' Sounds about right here. More importantly, however, the sudden shift from the impersonal forces and dates of Tolkien's first sentence here to the lonely private grief of the second stuns like a hammerblow. 

A similar disquiet born of memory can be heard in C. S. Lewis's letters of September 1939 in which he twice records 'the ghostly feeling that it has all happened before -- that one fell asleep during the last war and had a delightful dream and now has waked up again' (letters of  September 15th and 18th), and on October 2nd Lewis writes in a letter to his brother that the call-up of men 20 to 22 years of age would affect Tolkien's eldest son. Small wonder, then, that Tolkien or any man who felt he had been so 'caught' should think of escape, but it is the escape of the prisoner of war he speaks of, not of the deserter fleeing his duty. An important distinction is being made here. The prisoner of war who escapes is fulfilling his duty, and he escapes to carry on the fight, not to avoid it. Thus Tolkien is not speaking of an escape into fairy tales, but an escape through fairy tales. Just as Greek mythology did for others, fairy tales afforded Tolkien a way in which to parse his experience of the war and a framework in which to express the struggle to do so. 

In May 1944 in a letter to his son, Christopher, then in the RAF, Tolkien recommended writing as a means of expressing what he was feeling in the service:

I think also that you are suffering from suppressed 'writing'. That may be my fault. You have had rather too much of me and my peculiar mode of thought and reaction. And as we are so akin it has proved rather powerful. Possibly inhibited you. I think if you could begin to write, and find your own mode, or even (for a start) imitate mine, you would find it a great relief. I sense amongst all your pains (some merely physical) the desire to express your feeling about good, evil, fair, foul in some way: to rationalize it, and prevent it just festering. In my case it generated Morgoth and the History of the Gnomes.  

(Letters, no. 66)

Just as the bitterness of exceptional voices like Sassoon and Owen did not sum up all the possible reactions to the war (as many once believed, following Paul Fussell's brilliant The Great War and Modern Memory), so too Classics and Greek Mythology were not the sole means of expressing or working through those reactions. In recent years scholars have been moving towards a broader view of the poetry of The Great War, as well as a more balanced assessment of Tolkien vis à vis the other writers of his 'Modern' era. We need to do the same with the reaction that found expression in the 'mode' of fairy tale and fantasy. To write The Fall of Gondolin while recovering from trench fever is not the same as to fall for the Cottingley Fairies. We don't need to defend it as if it were. 

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Works Consulted

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Sir Orfeo, Faërian Drama, and the Quenta Noldorinwa

Copyright Ted Nasmith

In a forthcoming article I argue that in The Hobbit we can see Tolkien using the fairies of medieval Romance, specifically in Sir Orfeo, to recreate Elves that can be taken seriously, like those in The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion, and unlike the gossamer-winged sprites of Victorian England. (I posted an earlier, much shorter incarnation of this paper here last September).  One of the fascinating points to be noted in studying these texts from this perspective is that in Sir Orfeo it is Orfeo, a mortal Man, who can summon up visions by means of song, while in The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings this power belongs exclusively to the Elves. In my article I suggest that in the transference of this ability from Men to Elves we might be seeing the birth of what Tolkien termed 'Faërian Drama', which is 'a dream that some other mind is weaving' (OFS, 63, ¶ 74).

One of the passages I cited to illustrate this Elvish art describes the first meeting of Elves and Men, as initiated by Finrod:

Long Felagund watched them, and love for them stirred in his heart; but he remained hidden in the trees until they had all fallen asleep. Then he went among the sleeping people, and sat beside their dying fire where none kept watch; and he took up a rude harp which Bëor had laid aside, and he played music upon it such as the ears of Men had not heard; for they had as yet no teachers in the art, save only the Dark Elves in the wild lands. 

Now men awoke and listened to Felagund as he harped and sang, and each thought that he was in some fair dream, until he saw that his fellows were awake also beside him; but they did not speak or stir while Felagund still played, because of the beauty of the music and the wonder of the song. Wisdom was in the words of the Elven-king, and the hearts grew wiser that hearkened to him; for the things of which he sang, of the making of Arda, and the bliss of Aman beyond the shadows of the Sea, came as clear visions before their eyes, and his Elvish speech was interpreted in each mind according to its measure. 

(S 140-41)

Yet today I discovered in the Quenta Noldorinwa, one of the predecessors of The Silmarillion, a very interesting difference in its version of the first encounter of Elves and Men:

That night Felagund went among the sleeping men of Beor's host and sat by their dying fires where none kept watch, and he took a harp which Beor had laid aside, and he played music on it such as mortal ear had never heard, having learned the strains of music from the Dark-elves alone. Then men woke and listened and marvelled, for great wisdom was in that song, as well as beauty, and the heart grew wiser that listened to it. 

(Shaping 104-05)

In the passage from the Quenta Noldorinwa, which Christopher Tolkien dates securely to no later than 1930, the visionary experience of the Men is completely absent, however much they may have profited by Finrod's singing otherwise. The version of the tale we find in The Silmarillion dates to the 1950s, after Tolkien had finished writing The Lord of the Rings (Jewels, 173, 216-17). It is also worth noting here that one of the characteristics of Faërian Drama as portrayed in The Silmarillion passage quoted above is that the listener does not need to know the language of the Elves to comprehend their song. The hobbits in The Lord of the Rings have precisely this experience when they hear Gildor and his Elves singing in the woods of the Shire (FR 1.iii.79), an episode which dates to the earliest draft of what became the chapter Three's Company (Return 58-59).

It's as if between the two versions of this scene we can see dramatized the very transference of which I spoke above, in which Tolkien shifts the power of visionary enchantment from Orfeo to the Elves,

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Works Consulted

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Guest Post -- Trish Lambert -- Snow White and Bilbo Baggins

Last week an article about Tolkien's dislike of Disney's Snow White appeared at Atlas Obscura. The article quoted my friend, Trish Lambert, who had written an article of her own on Tolkien and Disney. In response to the interest many have expressed, Trish has graciously agreed to post her original article here. Below you will find some prefatory comments Trish has written for this occasion, and then the paper itself. Aside from some site-related reformatting, I have made no other alterations. If you prefer a pdf of the original, you will find one here.

tom

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Walt Disney has been part of my world since I was three years old; J.R.R. Tolkien joined me when I was twelve. In a way, Disney was a “gateway” to Tolkien, because without him fantasy would not have been such a large part of my childhood reading. My relationship to the two is now akin to two grandfathers who are worlds apart from one another. I love them both deeply, but I also recognize that the two will never get along.

In the months prior to the release of the first of Peter Jackson’s Hobbit movies, my attention was caught by an interesting juxtaposition. Disney’s release of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the first-ever feature-length animated film, and the first publication of Tolkien’s The Hobbit were quite close together in time. Not only that, but the portrayal the dwarves (I prefer Tolkien’s spelling) in both was a departure from the questionable (at best) or evil (at worst) nature of dwarves in traditional folklore. I wondered if there was a common reason why these two grandfathers of fantasy had made this change, and set about researching. The result is this paper.

The paper grew in the telling (apologies to Grampa Ronald for that), because there was no way to avoid looking at the relationship (or lack of same) between the two men. They were contemporaries, sharing the same world events and, to some extent, the same culture, and each made his own indelible mark on the fantasy genre. Did they know each other? Did they converse in any way? What did they think of each other? Those questions got included in my research and answered in the paper.

It may be my imagination, but in the years I’ve rubbed elbows with other Tolkien scholars, it has seemed to me that the “D” word is verboten in academic conversations about the professor and his works. I therefore kept mum after writing this one paper, but my fascination lingers. My dream is to publish a book length study of Disney, Tolkien and the impact they have had on the fantasy genre that we know today. “If you can dream it, you can do it,” Grampa Walt said. So that book may indeed become a reality someday!

SNOW WHITE AND BILBO BAGGINS

Divergences and Convergences between Disney and Tolkien

Patricia Lambert

In September 1937, London publishing house Allen & Unwin released a children’s book by an obscure Oxford professor; in December 1937, Walt Disney, world famous for his animated shorts films, released the first full length animated feature ever made. The Hobbit proved so popular that a second printing had to be rushed through before Christmas; Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was a runaway success from the first day. The princess and the hobbit crossed the Atlantic Ocean in opposite directions in 1938; the film debuted in London in February of that year (with countrywide release in September), and Houghton Mifflin published the U.S. edition of The Hobbit in September.

Snow White and The Hobbit were launched close together in time, both emphasized dwarfs (though Bilbo Baggins’ dwarves are very different from the dwarfs of Snow White), and both creators have had significant impact on the fantasy genre over the past 75 years. What was Tolkien’s opinion of Disney? Disney’s of Tolkien? Was the common dwarf element just a coincidence or did one story impact the other? Was there ever a possibility that these two “magic makers” would team up?

This paper considers Disney and Tolkien, the approach each took as creators of fantasy stories, the impact of the environment in which each story was created, and a range of comments by Disney, Tolkien, scholars, and the media to arrive at a clearer understanding of how (or if) Snow White, Bilbo Baggins, and their creators affected one other.

The Moviemaker and the Scholar

Can two men appear more different than Walt Disney and J.R.R. Tolkien? In the first, we see a U.S. stereotype, a 20th century Horatio Algeresque hero who achieved The American Dream. In the second, we see a British stereotype: the introverted, introspective, tweeded Oxford don. Disney was an ambitious entrepreneur who was intent on (and who succeeded in) making a lasting mark on the world. Tolkien led "the ordinary unremarkable life led by countless other scholars; a life of academic brilliance, certainly, but only in a very narrow professional field that is really of little interest to laymen" (Carpenter 118); he was a “stodgy old Oxford don” who took mythology and fantasy very seriously and who never aspired to be, though he became, “one of the most important authors of the twentieth century” (Olsen).

The processes by which Snow White and her dwarfs and Bilbo and his dwarves came to life are also quite different. Disney's sub-creative process was plural where Tolkien's was mainly solitary.1 The film was collaborative; in its MLA citation, there are 28 “authors” listed besides Disney (DVD).2 The process of “fairy tale to screen” was probably comparable to Peter Jackson’s in translating Tolkien's works into movies—characterized by a good team and a strong visionary leader. Thomas offers several examples of the group decision making process around various Snow White story elements (68-74).

At the other end of the spectrum, most of Tolkien’s sub-creative activities took place in solitude, though he did share his drafts as they took shape with trusted associates, like members of the Inklings. The “mutual influence and mutual interdependence” (Glyer 224) among the Inklings could be considered a collaboration of sorts, but of small impact on Tolkiens’s final result compared to the group impact on Disney’s process.

The Princess and the Hobbit

How do the stories themselves compare? Do they share similar roots? What influenced the development of each? 

"Once upon a time..."

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was basically a business venture. Though Disney and his brother and partner, Roy, had pulled themselves from the brink of a second bankruptcy with Mickey Mouse, the arrival of “talkies” and double features at America's movie houses was eroding demand for the cartoon shorts whose popularity had made the studio famous (Mouse & Man). The company needed a new direction, and Disney decided that production of a full length animated film was the right first step. He announced this intention to the world in 1934.

Disney’s choice of Snow White was from an experience as a teenager, when he saw the silent movie Snow White starring Marguerite Clark; it “remained the most vivid memory of his moviegoing childhood” (Thomas 65).

Themes and concepts for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs come from a source parallel to Tolkien’s Cauldron of Story—in Disney’s case, more accurately described as Pressure Cooker of Film. This description fits the Moviemaker’s focus on audience tastes for story line and his desire to “display what he [could] do as an animator with the latest technological and artistic developments” (Zipes 350). The Pressure Cooker was all about the 20th century, serving up popular ingredients that were folded into the movie; it “follows the pattern of the romantic comedies that were common in Hollywood in the early 1930s…[and] also expressed aspects of other genres…such as the serious romance film and the screwball comedy” (Wright).

This short synopsis offers examples of how Disney fit the film into the movie market of the time and how the story line matches or departs from the original Grimm fairy tale (DVD):

The opening credits and accompanying string-driven music match the style of live action movies of the 1930s. The story is shortened from the Grimms' tale in several places. It starts immediately with the stepmother queen (bearing a strong resemblance to Joan Crawford) and her magic mirror. In less than five minutes, we know that the queen has her sights set on doing away with Snow White.

We meet Snow White, resembling Cinderella in her ragged clothes and menial labor

(another departure from Grimm), cheerfully going about her tasks. She stops at a wishing well and sings to an audience of doves. The Prince, hearing the song, climbs over the wall in Erroll Flynn fashion and then serenades the princess Nelson Eddy-style, to which she responds with her best Jeannette McDonald. This is also a departure from the original; in the Grimm's tale, prince and princess do not meet until the end.

The story returns to the Grimm path from there for a bit, with Snow White fleeing from the huntsman (who cannot bring himself to kill her as ordered by the Queen) and into a dark and terrifying wood, with eyes everywhere and branches grabbing at her. Veering away from Grimm and into what would become a Disney signature story element, she recovers when she finds the eyes are those of friendly woodland creatures and celebrates with a song (reminiscent of Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers movies). The cuddly animals lead her to a small cottage which (unlike the Grimm story) is a terrible mess. She directs the animals(in a voice somewhere between Betty Boop and Shirley Temple) to clean up, and sings the first of the signature songs of the movie ("Whistle While You Work"). Vignettes reminiscent of Disney's short creature cartoons characterize the house cleaning session as animals dust, clean, and launder with comic consequences. 

We are introduced to the dwarfs at work in their mine; slapstick abounds as the second signature song is introduced (Hi Ho!). By the time this scene fades we are aware of the personalities and characteristics of each of the seven dwarfs.

The film now returns a bit closer to Grimm, as Snow White falls asleep across several of the dwarfs' beds. This is where they find her upon arriving home (after a Keystone Kops-style entry). Grimm is then left behind entirely as scenes with more slapstick and Marx Brothers' style comedy follow, including music and dancing, culminating with Snow White singing the third signature song ("Someday My Prince Will Come").

Meanwhile, back at the castle, the Queen discovers that the woodsman didn't do as commanded and that Snow White still lives. She transforms into a hag, creates a poison apple (shortening the Grimm tale again by eliminating the poisoned hair comb and bodice of the original story), and sets off to kill Snow White herself. She succeeds in doing so (she believes), but the woodland creatures have warned the dwarfs, who speed toward home as quickly as possible. The witch is killed when she tries to kill the dwarfs (a departure from Grimm, where she dies when forced to dance in red hot iron shoes at the princess's wedding).

The dwarfs entomb Snow White in a clear casket, which is how the Prince finds her. Instead of carrying her away as in the original tale, where an in-transit accident revives Snow White by dislodging the poison apple from her throat, the princess is revived by true love's first kiss, “an original Disney motif” (Wright). She says goodbye to the dwarfs and goes away with the prince to his beautiful castle.

"In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit..."

In contrast to Disney, Tolkien was “not somebody who [was] really writing for an audience, with

a sense of an audience, for most of his life” (Olsen). The Hobbit was not originally intended for publication; in fact, Tolkien may never have finished the book if not for friendly intervention. His impetus for writing it had been his sons’ desire for stories, but “the boys were growing up and no longer asked for the ‘Winter Reads,’ so there was no reason why The Hobbit should ever be finished.” It was only because of a family friend (Elaine Griffiths) who knew someone (Susan Dagnall) who worked at Allen & Unwin that the manuscript left Tolkien’s study; further, it was because 10-year-old Rayner Unwin gave it a positive review (Carpenter 183-84).

Tolkien told Stanley Unwin that “Mr. Baggins began as a comic tale among conventional and inconsistent Grimms’ fairy-tale dwarves” (Letters 19). Carpenter believes that work on The Hobbit started “in 1930 or 31…certainly there was a completed typescript in existence (lacking only the final chapters) in time for it to be shown to C.S. Lewis late in 1932” (181). Though Tolkien was reluctant to point to specific influences in his writing, ladlings from the Cauldron of Story certainly influenced The Hobbit. There are servings from the Elder Edda in the names of the dwarves (Völuspá), the conversation with Smaug (Fáfnismál), and the “tribes of orcs” and “Misty Mountains” (Skirnismál) (Shippey 345). Tolkien claimed Beowulf “among my most valued sources; though it was not consciously present to the mind in the process of writing” and wrote that The Hobbit is “derived from (previously digested) epic, mythology, and fairy-story” (Letters #25).

The nature of the “conventional and inconsistent Grimms’ fairy-tale dwarves” in The Hobbit is of particular interest in the context of this paper. Tolkien’s choice to make the dwarves of Bilbo Baggins into “good guys” is an unsolved mystery. Their portrayal is a departure from dwarf appearances in Tolkien's writings to date. Rateliff notes that until The Hobbit, Tolkien’s dwarves had "always been portrayed as an evil people: allies of goblins, mercenaries of Morgoth, pillagers of one of the great Elven kingdoms," and that this treatment aligns with the dwarf portrayals in the old legends from which Tolkien ladled much of his material. Rateliff goes on to observe that treating dwarves as heroes "is nothing short of amazing: no less surprising than if a company of goblin wolf-riders had ridden up to Bag-End seeking a really first-class burglar" (76).  

Nothing for Tolkien, Disdain for Disney

What about the men themselves? Were they aware of one another, and, if so, did they voice any opinions?

While there is no evidence that Disney was aware of Tolkien specifically,3 he generally appears to have had no use for scholars. When asked about his art by Aldous Huxley, his response was dismissive: “Art ?...I looked up the definition once, but I've forgotten what it is…you got to watch out for the boys with the dramatic sense and no sense of humor or they'll go arty on you…we just make a picture and then you professors come along and tell us what we do” (Walt & the Professors).

While Disney was apparently oblivious to Tolkien in the 1930s, Tolkien seems to have been painfully aware of Disney. Seven months before the US release of Snow White (nine months before the UK release), he voiced his “heartfelt loathing” of the works of Disney (Letters #13). This disdain may have been based on familiarity with the Moviemaker’s animated shorts; it also may have had roots in Disney’s aggressive promotion of the film in the UK. Between numerous newspaper and magazine articles about the film and a staggering range of tie-in merchandise that filled the shops (Kuhn), Tolkien was probably unable to ignore the looming figure of the Moviemaker as he approached the fantasy world.4

Disney was probably a topic of conversation for the Inklings in the late 1930s (and beyond). Early in 1939, a year after the film’s UK premier in London, C.S. Lewis viewed Snow White with Tolkien, who considered the heroine “to be beautiful but dislike[d] the…treatment of the dwarfs” (Companion I 224). Tolkien was mild in his criticism compared to Lewis, who had already seen the film once before with his brother Warren.5 Characteristically outspoken, Lewis noted “good originality” in the portrayal of the evil queen and “bad originality in the bloated, drunken, low comedy faces of the dwarfs. Neither the wisdom, the avarice, nor the earthiness of true dwarfs were there, but an imbecility of arbitrary invention” (Companion II 210).6

The full collection of available references made by Tolkien to Disney is quite short. 7 The chronological list of comments in available publications is comprised of:

1937: To C.A. Furth at Allen & Unwin about illustrations for the American edition of The Hobbit: "It might be advisable, rather than lose the American interest, to let the Americans do what seems good to them -- as long as it was possible (I should like to add) to veto anything from or influenced by the Disney studios (for all whose works I have a heartfelt loathing)." (Letters #13)

1946 : Emendations to On Fairy-Stories “include the removal of a disparaging footnote reference to ‘the work of Disney,’ criticized for uniting ‘beautiful external detail with inner vulgarity’” (OFS 136).

1946: To Stanley Unwin regarding a German translation of The Hobbit: “He has sent me some illustrations…which despite certain merits…are I fear too “Disnified”… Bilbo with a dribbling nose, and Gandalf as a figure of vulgar fun rather than the Odinic wanderer that I think of…” (Letters #106)

1961: Responding to a letter from his aunt in which she praised The Pied Piper Tolkien wrote, “I am sorry about The Pied Piper. I loathe it. God help the children! I would as soon give them crude and vulgar plastic toys. Which of course they will play with, to the ruin of their taste. Terrible presage of the most vulgar elements of Disney” (Letters #234).

1964: Tolkien writes of Disney in a letter: “...I recognize his talent, but it has always seemed to me hopelessly corrupted. Though in most of the 'pictures' proceeding from his studios there are admirable or charming passages, the effect of all of them is to me disgusting. Some have given me nausea...” (Sotheby’s). 8 9

The Heart of the Matter

Loathing, vulgarity, corruption, disgust, nausea—these are strong words.10 Tolkien’s anti-Disney position, which remained consistent through the years, raises a new question which drives to the heart of the matter from Tolkien’s perspective: Why did Disney’s work, beginning with Snow White, prompt such strong reactions in the Scholar?

On Fairy-Stories, the “manifesto in which [Tolkien] declared his particular concept of what fantasy is and how it ought to work,” provides some insight into the answer (OFS 9). Snow White (and virtually all of Disney’s subsequent fairy tale adaptations) is a significant departure from the story upon which the studio advertisements say it is based. In addition to the elimination or modification of original story elements, the movie incorporates other elements that have nothing to do with the plot (added to appeal to moviegoers’ tastes). The changes are much more significant than the differences (that Tolkien criticizes) between Perrault’s Red Riding Hood and re-told versions of the tale (OFS 39). Tolkien could easily be referring to Disney when he says, “The old stories are mollified or bowdlerized…the imitations are often merely silly (OFS 59).”

Turning literature into Drama is also problematic, says Tolkien: “the characters, and even the scenes, are in Drama not imagined but actually beheld” (OFS 63). Though he is referring to live, human-acted drama here, his published comments about Disney infer that he believed that the Moviemaker was also attempting “a kind of bogus…magic” by focusing his movie machine on traditional fairy-tales.11

In light of the date it was prepared and delivered and current events, the Andrew Lang lecture itself could be a sort of direct commentary by Tolkien on Disney. According to Anderson and Flieger, the lecture that eventually became the essay was delivered in March of 1939 and was“probably written between December 1938 and March 1939” (122). Though a date is notspecified, Scull and Hammond report that Tolkien saw Snow White in Lewis’s company “early in 1939” (Companion I 224). Contemporary news reports of the lecture make no mention of Disney (OFS 161-69). In light of the unprecedented promotion and merchandising tie-ins that occurred in Great Britain in the months prior to (and continuing after) the release of Snow White in the UK, the amount of post-release attention given to the Moviemaker and the princess by the media (Kuhn), and the direct correlation between the movie and the topic of Tolkien’s lecture, Tolkien’s choice to omit any reference to Disney or cinematic portrayals of fairy-stories in general may have been a negative comment—perhaps that the Moviemaker and his vulgar film were too far beneath the notice of lecturer and audience to be acknowledged.

Conclusion

The subtitle of this paper refers to “divergences and convergences” between Walt Disney and J.R.R. Tolkien. In spite of commonalities of dates and dwarfs, research and analysis of information surrounding these two men and their landmark creations point to far more divergence than convergence. The apparent differences between the Moviemaker and the Scholar are in fact quite real.

The questions posed in the introduction can now be answered with a higher degree of clarity:

• What was Tolkien’s opinion of Disney? Tolkien considered Disney’s work “vulgar,” and continued to hold (and perhaps strengthened) this opinion through the years.

• Disney’s of Tolkien? There is no evidence that Disney personally knew or corresponded with or about Tolkien. He likely became aware of Tolkien as someone whose works might be adapted to film, but as mentioned in end note 9, the studio decided that adaptation of The Lord of the Rings would be too costly.

• Was the common dwarf element just a coincidence or did one story impact the other? With the two works having originated in widely different circumstances and times, and in spite of the change of the nature of Tolkien’s dwarves from previous writings, the presence of dwarfs as central characters in both works can only be coincidental.

• Was there ever a possibility that these two “magic makers” would team up? It is highly unlikely that Tolkien would ever have agreed to work with Disney, even if the studio hadshown interest in adapting his works to film. Disney, with his Pressure Cooker of Film, his corruption of the old tales, and his eye on progress and profit was likely far too much for Tolkien to stomach.

Disney appears to have demonstrated all the worst aspects of storytelling for Tolkien, and Tolkien was surely too “arty” and professorial for Disney. Still, Snow White and Bilbo Baggins both celebrated their 75th birthdays in 2012, and the princess and the hobbit, along with their creators, will be celebrated around the world in various ways. But while the Moviemaker and the Scholar each made a unique and lasting contribution to the fantasy genre, there is a chasm between them that will probably always be difficult (if not impossible) to cross.

1 The concept of sub-creation is uniquely Tolkien’s, described by Anderson and Flieger as “the creative interaction of human imagination and human language that in [Tolkien’s] opinion gives rise to myth” (OFS 11). This is probably considered by many to be far beyond Disney’s creative process, but for simplicity’s sake, I will refer to both processes as “sub-creative.”

2 A 1942 Time Magazine article quotes Disney: “Do you know how long it would have taken one man to make [Snow White]? I figured it out —just 250 years” (Walt & the Professors).

3 An Internet hoax created the impression that Disney and Tolkien were friends. “The Tale of Lossiel” is a detailed piece that claims to be a piece to be included in Volume XIII of History of Middle-earth lent to the web page’s author by Christopher Tolkien. It refers to a note scribbled by Tolkien in the margin that said, “Lent to Walt 2/13/37.” The manuscript continues as if written by Christopher, “The identity of Walt is unknown, but a loose slip found among my father's papers, torn from an Oxford lecture list for Trinity term 1939, reads (in a large and hasty scrawl) Cut Walt out of will!!!!!!” (Hicklin). I obtained a photocopy of Tolkien’s last will and testament, and, not surprisingly, neither Disney nor any other entity outside the Tolkien family is named in relation to Tolkien’s legendarium.

4 Priscilla Tolkien was eight years old at this time, and may have also been influenced by the pre-Snow White PR and merchandising that blanketed the UK. If so, Professor Tolkien may have been unable to escape Disney even in his own study.

5 Warren Lewis considered the film “first rate…It was well worth going to if only for the scene of the spring ceaning of the dwarfs’ house” (CSL Biography 160).

6 Lewis later populated Narnia with dwarfs that displayed the “right” characteristics, among whom were the black dwaarf who served the White Witch in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, Trumpkin the red dwarf in Prince Caspian, and the black dwarfs who end up in a sort of limbo in The Last Battle.

7 Given the ubiquity of Disney’s works from the 1930s onward, and the fact that so many animated features wereabout Disney’s Faerie as defined by the Pressure Cooker of Film, it is surprising that there are so few commentsfrom Tolkien on record. There are no references to Disney at all in Carpenter’s biography and only four references in The Letters of JRRT. It is possible that Humphrey Carpenter, Christopher Tolkien, and other family members with access to the professor’s papers have chosen not to make additional commentary public because of its highly negative content.

8 The letter was sold at auction by Sotheby's London in 2001 for £17,500. As a point of interest, Tolkien also directly criticizes Disney as a person, saying that the Moviemaker is “simply a cheat: willing and even eager to defraud the less experienced by trickery sufficiently 'legal' to keep him out of jail…I should not have given any proposal from Disney any consideration at all. I am not all that poor..." Though the basis upon which Tolkien formed this opinion is not known for certain, there is speculation that it came from the loud and widespread complaints of P.L. Travers. Travers, author of the Mary Poppins books, felt that she had been tricked by Disney into giving him authorization to make a movie based on her books and then left out of the decision making process during its filming (Flanagan). The Disney film was released in 1964, which coincides with the period of most vehement complaining by Travers as well as the year Tolkien penned this letter.

9 As an interesting side note, in 1966 Joy Hill at Allen & Unwin, responsible for promoting Tolkien to the media, sent The Lord of the Rings to Disney Studios for consideration as a film adaptation, presumably without Tolkien’s knowledge or consent. The studio declined on the basis of the high cost to make such a film (Companion II 210).

10 Lewis was in agreement with Tolkien. In a letter to BBC producer Lance Sieveking, Lewis says “…if only Disney did not combine so much vulgarity with his genius!” (Doctorow). In a conversation with Jane Douglass, he observed, “Too bad we didn't know Walt Disney before he was spoiled, isn't it?” (An Enduring Friendship). Specific to Snow White, Lewis concluded a commentary on the film by saying, “What might have come of it if the man had been educated -- or even brought up in a decent society?” (Collected Letters 242).

11 Some modern-day scholars have offered critique of Disney worthy of the Scholar. For example, Stone echoes Tolkien’s criticism of “flower-fairies and fluttering sprites” (OFS 29) by criticizing Disney’s “portrayal of a cloying fantasy world filled with cute little beings existing among pretty flowers and singing animals” (44).  Though much more forthright, Curry is reminiscent of Tolkien’s letter to his aunt (above): “Disney’s images violently occupy the mind, gradually destroying the child’s imaginative ability to visualize for him/herself” (134).

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