Disposable Lit Reviews

St. Martin’s Press, 2001
235 pp.
ISBN 0-312-27536-6

Buy it from Amazon.com or
eBay or Half.com

Let’s get one thing out of the way: This is not a crass marketing attempt to cash in on the current Tolkien-mania. At least, the contents aren’t. I’m certain that the germ of the project came about when someone in Byron Preiss’s office said, “Hey, I bet if we got some well-known authors to do essays on Tolkien, we could make a bundle,” but in terms of the actual content, one can’t dismiss the essays here so cavalierly. These are highly personal essays for the most part, revealing how contact with The Lord of the Rings changed individual lives and how the authors chose their fantastist career paths largely because of it.

Of course, the fact that it’s sincere is absolutely no guarantee that it’s good.

It would probably be different if they were all talking about a different author. Lovecraft, for example. There are thousands of fantasy and horror writers who owe and acknowledge a debt to Lovecraft, and would probably be able and willing to explore their relationship to Lovecraft’s work in essay form. But Lovecraft didn’t start a complete publishing genre (all Mythos fanzines to the contrary). And people are attracted to Lovecraft by different facets, recognizing his considerable weaknesses at the same time.

But this isn’t about Lovecraft, or anyone like him. It’s about Tolkien, God Among Men, creator of myth to whose level all acolytes aspire and none achieve, whose deeply-constructed alternate world forcibly changed this world for these authors.

And you’ll hear about it many times over. And over. And over.

By the end of the book, you’ll be able to reconstruct the Archetypal Tolkien Experience: A questing adolescent in the ’60’s or early ’70’s (since these are pretty much a crowd of currently acknowledged master fantasists, they all got their start in the first or second wave of Tolkien popularity) discovers those strange-looking paperbacks almost by accident, and is swept up into an obsessive reading frenzy. The world never looks the same again, Myth becomes a power in their lives, and they found themselves acknowledging Tolkien obliquely or overtly in their later output.

I don’t mean to denigrate any single experience; Tolkien’s a formative influence on my life, and I can identify. But how many times to I have to hear a variation on the same damned conversion story? Some of them are sketchy; some of them are deeply personal, in that Tolkien was a blessed escape from an honestly abusive environment; some of them take the humorous tack — “Blame Tolkien, he made me do it.” But lion’s share of the essays, taken together, have the stultifying effect of a three-hour “How I Came to Jesus” testimonial revival, minus the cheesy organ music.

I don’t blame the authors; I blame the editor, Karen Haber. She should have known that, by giving everyone carte blanche to write whatever they wanted about Tolkien, most of them would write their own variation of the same experience. And of course, since these are giants in the fantas field, she couldn’t very well reject their deeply-personal essays and say, “Sorry, we’ve got too many like that already — could you give us something a little more novel?”

Of the fourteen essays (plus the introduction, and a conversation with the Hildebrant brothers), four manage to distinguish themselves from the testimonial format:

- Orson Scott Card offers an essay on the legitimate non-allegorical reading of The Lord of the Rings that even I find reactionary. I usually agree with Card; I’m definitely in the same camp as far as Modernist and Post-Modern literature goes, and I also believe that the works of James Joyce are in large part an esoteric practical joke that the denizens of academie are unwilling to admit they’ve been snookered by. And yes, it’s true that Tolkien flatly said that The Lord of the Rings is not an allegory. But in his haste to (rightly) separate Tolkien’s work from the kind of typical 20th-century literature that is constructed precisely to be dissected by academia, Card manages to overlook the fact that an “allegory” to a professor of medieval literature is a didactic one-to-one correspondence (think of Pilgrim’s Progress), he completely ignores the fact that events in the author’s life can and do impact a work discernibly, despite the fact that the author is not purposely writing about those events. To claim that one should not see clear echoes of World War 2 and the industrialization of pastoral England in The Lord of the Rings borders on ludicrous, especially since Card then goes back and pretty much hints at the same thing, saying that Tolkien was trying simply to express what was “true” to him in the best way he knew how. Certainly not one of Card’s finer moments.

- Ursula K. LeGuin explores rhythmic patterns in the text — not at the sentence-level, since Tolkien separates his prose and poetry almost completely, but in the cadence of the storytelling itself, complete with patterns of opposing imagery (north/south, light/dark, etc.). After all of the highly emotional personal essays, this one comes across as a little dry, especially since her observations are both rather weak, and reach very little conclusion.

- Douglas A. Anderson is not a novelist, but a Tolkien scholar, and after the obligatory “How I got Tolkien” section, he points out the small but growing number of academics willing to accord Tolkien space in the 20th-century canon; he also gives an overview of how the other, posthumously published writings help us understand what Tolkien meant to construct in Middle-Earth, and how he felt about what he’d managed to finish.

But the most compelling section in the entire book is Michael Swanwick’s essay. Swanwick also must tell how he originally found Tolkien, but such is not his focus; it is only background of the true tale of how he found Tolkien a second time, when reading the trilogy aloud to his son Sean. And because I am currently doing the same with my son, and because my matured second impression mirrors Swanwick’s so closely, the following leapt out at me:

What he heard was the same book I had discovered that sleepless night in the land of Long Ago and Far Away — the single best adventure story ever written. As an adult, however, I found that during my long absence it had transformed itself into something else entirely. It was now the saddest book in the world.

This is a tale in which everyone is in the process of losing everything they hold most dear. The elves, emblematic of magic, are passing away from Middle-earth. Galadriel laments the dwindling of Lothlorien. Treebeard reveals that ents are surrendering their awareness and growing increasingly tree-ish. The old ways — all of them — are disappearing. Trees are being cut down, and streams defiled. Blasting powder has been invented. Industrialization is on its way. Defeating the Dark Lord and slaughtering his armies will not change any of this.

. . . From experience, Tolkien knew that there are only two possible responses to the ending of an age. You can try to hold on, or your can let go. Those who try to sieze the power to ward off change are corrupted by despair (Saruman, Theoden, and Denethor most notably, but there are others). Those who are willing to pay for all they have, to suffer and make sacrifices, to toil selflessly and honorably, and then to surrender their authority over what remains, ultimately gain the satisfaction of knowing that the world has a future worth passing on to their children. But it has no place for them anymore. Nevertheless — and this is what moved me most — Tolkien’s vision of the combined horrors of the twentieth century ended with hope and forgiveness.
This is a book sad with wisdom. It moved me in ways my son could not feel.

Without Swanwick’s essay, there might have been some sections of interest here, but very little of worth. I understand the impulse to pay homage by contributing; such is what gave us “fantasy” as a publishing category, and we can all see how far the intent falls short of the output; the great work is not made greater by being surrounded by hosts of sincere but inferior imitators (to say nothing of the insincere ones). Accounts of the juvenile discovery of Tolkien do not add to the discovered book; such juvenile discoveries are a dime a dozen, and the only difference between those in the book and those in all of the other enchanted readers the world over is that these authors took the impression perhaps more deeply, and had their lives more visibly formed by it as a consequence. But youthful exuberance can cover a multitude of literary sins. To see instead a mature individual go back to that wonderful novel and discover that it can speak now more deeply to him because he is now deep enough to receive more — that is a discovery that I can take from the book with gratitude and appreciation, and which points up for me again how damned fine a novel The Lord of the Rings is.

Nathan Shumate