Meditations on Middle-Earth (10 page)

As I’ve noted before, perhaps the greatest debt of gratitude fantasists of all stripes—emphatically not just the imitators—owe to J. R. R. Tolkien is what his success did for the genre as a whole. A couple of generations ago, speaking in broad terms, fantasy was something writers occasionally turned out in between novels full of spaceships. Science fiction normally outsold it by a considerable margin.

It isn’t like that any more. Fantasy novels, these days, appear on bestseller lists far more regularly than their counterparts from science fiction. And a rising tide lifts all boats. Fantasies that could not have hoped to find a home in the 1950s or 1960s now have a better chance of seeing print, because—in no small measure due too Tolkien’s work—fantasy has become a recognized category of its own. It is no accident that the professional organization for those who produce speculative fiction recently changed its name from the Science Fiction Writers of America to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

The next question to ask is, why has this happened? What has made Tolkien so enduringly popular? What has made fantasy in general so popular, besides Tolkien’s example? Part of the answer, I think, lies in the ongoing, ever more rapid, changes in American life—indeed, in life throughout the industrialized world—during the course of the twentieth century, and especially after the end of World War II. We are all travelers nowadays. When we look back to our childhoods, we remember a world quite different from the one in which we live today.

Take me as an example. I am, as I write these words, fifty-one. Things we take for granted nowadays that either did not exist or were in their infancy when I was born include television; vaccines for polio, mumps, measles, and chicken pox (I had all but the first, though I didn’t come down with chicken pox till the age of forty-three); frozen foods; jet airliners; no-fault divorce; most, though not all, antibiotics; audio- and videotapes; space travel and most of what we know of astronomy (in the 1950s, the canals of Mars and oceans of Venus were legitimate topics for hard science fiction); birth-control pills; microwave ovens; the civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, and environmental movements; freeways and the interstate highway system; rock ‘n’ roll; lasers; CDs; mass in the vernacular rather than Latin; computers; legal pornography; e-mail; the hydrogen bomb; organ transplants; and the World Wide Web. The list is brief, and far from comprehensive.

No wonder, then, that every so often we are tempted to stop and wonder, What the hell am I doing here? Throughout almost the entire course of human history, people lived in much the same world at the end of their lives as at the beginning. Change did happen, but incrementally, even glacially. Medieval artists dressed the Roman soldiers around the crucified Jesus in the armor of their own day, and saw nothing incongruous in doing so. That styles and techniques in such things had altered through time was beyond their mental horizon.

Only in the past couple of hundred years has change become rapid enough to grow visible in the course of a single human life. It is no accident that historical fiction—fiction emphasizing the differences between past and present—came into being at about the same time as the Industrial Revolution took flight. The smooth continuum between past and present was broken; the past became a separate country, and interesting specifically because of that.

I also think it no accident that fantasy has become so popular in an age of unprecedented change. It offers the reader a glimpse of a world where the verities underlying society endure, where moral values are strong (and, returning directly to Tolkien here, those who neglect the moral underpinnings of his work blind themselves to a large part of the world he built), where choices between Good and Evil are simpler than in the real world, and where Good may reasonably be expected to triumph in the end. It’s an anchor on a wildly tossing sea. Sometimes, it can be a crutch.

Few of us, I think—I hope!—would care to live permanently in such a world. But, especially when presented as magnificently as Tolkien does, it is a wonderful place to visit. We can enjoy the intricate adventure for its own sake, and for the respite it gives us from the complications and frustrations of mundane life. And, perhaps, even after we set the books aside, we find ourselves a little more ready to face with good heart the world in which we do live. What more could one possibly ask of a work of the imagination?

CULT
CLASSIC

TERRY PRATCHETT

T
he Lord of the Rings is a cult classic. I know that’s true, because I read it in the newspapers, saw it on the TV, heard it on the radio.

We know what “cult” means. It’s a put-down word. It means “inexplicably popular but unworthy.” It’s a word used by the guardians of the one true flame to dismiss anything that is liked by the wrong kind of people. It also means “small, hermetic, impenetrable to outsiders.” It has associations with cool drinks in Jonestown.

The Lord of the Rings has well over one hundred million readers. How big will it have to be to emerge from cult status? Or, once having been a cult—that is to say, once having borne the mark of Gain—is it actually possible that anything can
ever
be allowed to become a full-fledged Classic?

But democracy has been in action over the past few years. A British bookshop chain held a vote to find the country’s favorite book. It was The Lord of the Rings. Another one not long afterward, held this time to find the favorite author, came up with J. R. R. Tolkien.

The critics carped, which was expected but nevertheless strange. After all, the bookshops were merely using the word “favorite.” That’s a very personal word. No one ever said it was a synonym for “best.” But a critic’s chorus hailed the results as a terrible indictment on the taste of the British public, who’d been given the precious gift of democracy and were wasting it on quite unsuitable choices. There were hints of a conspiracy amongst the furry-footed fans. But there was another message, too. It ran: “Look, we’ve been trying to tell you for bears which books are good! And you just don’t
listen!
You’re not listening now! You’re just going out there and buying this damn book! And the worst part is that we can’t stop you! We can tell you it’s rubbish, it’s not relevant, it’s the worst kind of escapism, it was written by an author who never came to our parties and didn’t care what we thought, but unfortunately the law allows you to go on not listening! You are stupid, stupid,
stupid!”

And, once again, no one listened. Instead, a couple of years later, a national newspaper’s Millennium Masterworks poll produced five works of what could loosely be called “narrative fiction” among the top fifty “masterworks” of the last thousand years, and, yes, there was The Lord of the Rings
again
.

The Mona Lisa was also in the top fifty masterworks. And I admit to suspecting that she was included by many of the voters out of a sheer cultural knee-jerk reaction, mildly dishonest but well meant. Quick, quick, name of the greatest works of art of the last thousand years! Er . . . er . . . well, the Mona Lisa, obviously. Fine, fine, and have you
seen
the Mona Lisa? Did you stand in front of her? Did the smile entrance you, did the eyes follow you around the room and back to your hotel? Er . . . no, not as such . . . but, uh, well, it’s the Mona Lisa, okay? You’ve
got
to include the Mona Lisa. And that guy with the fig leaf, yeah. And that woman with no arms.

That’s honesty, of a sort. It’s a vote for the good taste of your fellow citizens and your ancestors as well. Joe Average knows that a vote for a picture of dogs playing poker is probably not, when considered against the background of one thousand years, a very sensible thing to cast.

But The Lord of the Rings, I suspect, got included when people stopped voting on behalf of their culture and quietly voted for what they liked. We can’t all stand in front of one picture and feel it open up new pathways in our brain, but we can—most of us—read a mass-market book.

I can’t remember where I was when JFK was shot, but I can remember exactly where and when I was when I first read J. R. R. Tolkien. It was New Year’s Eve, 1961. I was babysitting for friends of my parents while they all went out to a party. I didn’t mind. I’d got this three-volume yacht anchor of a book from the library that day. Boys at school had told me about it. It had maps in it, they said. This struck me at the time as a pretty good indicator of quality.

I’d waited quite a long time for this moment. I was that kind of kid, even then.

What can I remember? I can remember the vision of beech woods in the Shire; I was a country boy, and the hobbits were walking through a landscape which, give or take the odd housing development, was pretty much the one I’d grown up in. I remember it like a movie. There I was, sitting on this rather chilly sixties-style couch in this rather bare room; but at the edges of the carpet, the forest began. I remember the light as green, coming through trees. I have never since then so truly had the experience of being inside the story.

I can remember the click of the central heating going off and the room growing colder, but these things were happening on the horizon of my senses and weren’t relevant. I can’t remember going home with my parents, but I do remember sitting up in bed until 3:00
A.M.
, still reading. I don’t recall going to sleep. I
do
remember waking up with the book open on my chest, and finding my place, and going on reading. It took me, oh, about twenty-three hours to get to the end.

Then I picked up the first book and started again. I spent a long time looking at the runes.

Already, as I admit this, I can feel the circle of new, anxious but friendly faces around me: “My name is Terry and I used to draw dwarf runes in my school notebooks. It started with, you know, the straight ones, everyone can do them, but then I got in deeper and before I knew it I was doing the curly elf ones with the dots. Wait . . . there’s worse. Before I’d even heard the word ‘fandom’ I was writing weird fan fiction. I wrote a crossover story setting Jane Austen’s
Pride and Prejudice
in Middle-earth; the rest of the kids loved it, because a class of thirteen-year-old boys with volcanic acne and groinal longings is not best placed to appreciate Miss Austen’s fine prose. It was a really good bit when the ores attacked the rectory. . . .” But around about then, I suspect, the support group would have thrown me out.

Enthralled I was. To the library I went back, and spake thusly: “Have you got any more books like these? Maybe with maps in? And runes?”

The librarian gave me a mildly disapproving look, but I ended up with
Beowulf
and a volume of Norse sagas. He meant well, but it wasn’t the same. It took someone several stanzas just to say who they were.

But that drew me to the Mythology shelves. The Mythology shelves were next to the Ancient History shelves. What the hell . . . it was all guys with helmets, wasn’t it? On, on . . . maybe there’s a magical ring! Or runes!

The desperate search for the Tolkien effect opened up a new world for me, and it was this one.

History as it was then taught in British schools was big on kings and acts of Parliament, and was full of dead people. It had a certain strange, mechanistic structure to it. What happened in 1066? The Battle of Hastings. Full marks. And what else happened in 1066? What do you mean, what else happened? The Battle of Hastings was what 1066 was
for
. We’d “done” the Romans (they came, they saw, they had some baths, they built some roads and left) but my private reading colored in the picture. We hadn’t “done” the Greeks. As for the empires of Africa and Asia, did
anyone
“do” them at all? But hey, look here in this book; these guys don’t use runes, it’s all pictures of birds and snakes; but, look, they know how to pull a dead king’s brains out through his nose. . . .

And on I went, getting the best kind of education possible, which is the one that happens while you think you’re having fun. Would it have happened anyway? Possibly. We never know where the triggers are. But The Lord of the Rings was a step-change in my reading. I was already enjoying, but The Lord of the Rings opened me up to the rest of the library.

I used to read it once a year, in the spring.

I’ve realized that I don’t any more, and I wonder why. It’s not the dense and sometime ponderous language. It’s not because the scenery has more character than the characters, or the lack of parts for women, or the other perceived or real offenses against the current social codes.

It’s simply because I have the movie in my head, and it’s been there for forty years. I can still remember the luminous green of the beechwoods, the freezing air of the mountains, the terrifying darkness of the dwarf mines, the greenery on the slopes of Ithilien, west of Mordor, still holding out against the encroaching shadow. The protagonists don’t figure much in the movie, because they were never more to me than figures in a landscape that was, itself, the hero. I remember it at least as clearly as—no, come to think of it,
more
clearly than—I do many of the places I’ve visited in what we like to call the real world. In fact, it is strange to write this and realize that I can remember stretches of the Middle-earth landscape as real places. The characters are faceless, mere points in space from which their dialogue originated. But Middle-earth is a place I went to.