Have we reached peak J.R.R. Tolkien oversaturation?
The Tolkien estate has been doling out licenses for tv shows, games, movies, books and toys like they’re rings of power. We once knew little about the mysterious world of Middle-earth — now we might know far too much.
Enter into this fray “The King Under the Mountain: In Search of J.R.R. Tolkien” by the British author D.J. Taylor, an excellent and unauthorized biography of the creator of “Lord of the Rings” and the “Hobbit.”
Taylor is a fully paid-up, although thankfully discerning, Tolkien obsessive, and has been since childhood.
“I wanted to take another look at a particular hero of my early teen-dom using all the critical and interpretative tools I’ve picked up in the intervening years with the aim of seeing whether my attitude toward [Tolkien] had changed,” Taylor told The Post. In other words: he wanted to see whether Tolkien is actually any good or just good if you’re a teenage boy.
Tolkien inspires not just love but obsession among fanatical readers of all backgrounds.
I’ve never been a fan. I share the judgment of Tolkien’s fellow author, Hugo Dyson, who once loudly moaned, “Oh no, not another f–king elf!” as he listened to a passage from “Lord of the Rings.”
Yet it’s undeniable that Tolkien changed fantasy forever. It’s impossible to imagine the genre without him. He used his deep study of Anglo-Saxon and Middle English to research obscure and forgotten texts and to bring them into his richly detailed universe of, as Taylor writes, “hobbits, elves, dwarves, orcs and men and women who in most respects behave as if they have just walked out of a medieval tapestry.”
As for the man himself, he maintained a vague figure and gave the impression of being a man from another time, one who managed to resist the age in which he lived to admirable effect — a juxtaposition that Taylor is both perceptive and entertaining about. Tolkien was especially bothered by the idea of “planners” turning his beloved country into “one blasted little provincial suburb,” which reflects the conservatism pervasive throughout his books.
Taylor’s work is not a cradle-to-grave biography. There hasn’t been such a definitive work since 1977, when Humphrey Carpenter published his authorized bio. “You can’t write a straight [biography],” Taylor tells The Post, “because the Tolkien estate won’t allow it.”
Even Carpenter’s work was heavily edited by J.R.R.’s son Christopher. Carpenter himself said the work wasn’t edited but rather “castrated.” And Token himself saw biography as a sort of literary grave-robbing.
“I thought it would be more profitable — and interesting — to come in at a series of oblique angles,” Taylor told The Post.
The section titles thus bear such tantalizing labels as “Tolkien and God,” “Gandalf’s Garden: Tolkien and the Sixties” and “The Shire: A Sociopolitical Survey.”
Denied access to the Tolkien estate as well as the author’s papers at Bodleian Library in Oxford, Taylor makes use of a mixture of surmise, scholarship and smut. I jest, of course. As Taylor points out, Tolkien’s universe is profoundly sexless, which is probably just as well given the amount of time muscular men spend in close quarters doing and saying brave and honorable things.
Given these limits, Taylor has done excellent work. Such chapters as “Tolkien and the Writers” examines his literary standing at a time when Tolkien didn’t care at all to associate with his contemporaries. He even dismissed his admirer the poet W.H. Auden when the latter proposed to write a short study of him. “[Auden] no doubt overrates the ‘Lord of the Rings’ because he reads into it something that he means to write himself,” wrote Tolkien.
This and similar chapters manage to illuminate Tolkien and his world in a way that no other biographer has.
Others, such as the aforementioned “The Shire: A Sociopolitical Survey,” assume a far greater knowledge and interest in the minutiae of Middle-earth than many general readers will possess.
And occasionally Taylor dives headlong into simple self-indulgence. He is the author of a fantastic biography of George Orwell, but there is absolutely no reason to have a (brief) chapter on the nonexistent relationship between Orwell and Tolkien. This chapter is flooded with the usual couching along the lines of “there is no guarantee” and “there is no point over-stressing” that a writer must use when his argument does not wholly hold water.
Still, Taylor sees connection between the two Englishman. “I think what happened [to Tolkien and Orwell] is what happens to all writers who become international sensations,” he told The Post. “They fly off into a world ordinary literary appreciation can’t follow and see whatever message they may or may not have diluted by the mass media and mean virtually anything their fans want it to mean.”
Tolkien’s life was undramatic in many regards. His friend C.S. Lewis’s late-in-life romance with American academic Joy Davidman, inspiration for the film “Shadowlands,” was far spicier than anything that ever happened to Tolkien. The most notable thing to happen to the Middle-earth creator was his success.
But it was something that he came to resent rather than cherish, complaining that it “came too late” to have given him a happier life when he was younger. He viewed his status as a counter-cultural guru with bafflement.
One particular challenge with Tolkien is that he actively resisted the idea that biography could shed light on a writer’s themes and interests. But as he told Auden, Tolkien’s “instinct is to cloak such self-knowledge as he has, and such criticisms of life as he knows it, under mythological and legendary dress.”
For instance, the absent fathers and malevolent spiders of “Lord of the Rings” surely owe their presence to the death of Tolkien’s father Arthur when he was 4 and the incident when he was bitten by a tarantula at a similar age. Similarly, the killing fields of Flanders, where he served before being invalided out with trench fever, must have inspired the Dead Marshes of “The Two Towers.”
Tolkien published only a handful of books in his lifetime. After he died, his son Christopher began publishing practically anything his father wrote, including unfinished tales and other fragments: “The Return of the Shadow,” “The Treason of Isengard,” “The Silmarillion.” (Taylor endearingly calls the last of these “dull beyond measure; ponderous, sedate and manifestly over-written.”)
The family’s estate has only picked up the publishing pace, and now you cannot go more than two steps without bumping into some Middle-earth export, most of which are rubbish. Thus the question of whether we’ve reached peak oversaturation.
Taylor thinks not. As he told The Post: “The fanbase is too vast and tenacious and the themes in which Tolkien deals are so universal. That said, you can sometimes have too much of a good thing and I do wonder what the point of some of the new iterations is, other than to make money.”
As for Taylor’s addition, “The King Under the Mountain” is a long-overdue, fine tribute to a complex figure who has long merited closer examination. Taylor has gone on a quest, and, in his way, found that the king under the mountain was worth the excavation.
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