The Realms of Tolkien
©1966 by James Cawthorn
“I love [revision]. I am a natural niggler, fascinated by detail. But it is becoming evident that I had better get on, and leave what is printed, with its inevitable defects. I’m a very busy man, I always have been, with a great deal of my own work to do; and they keep on expecting a ‘Great Book’ of me. ‘Great Book,’ is what they say and expect, and it alarms me.”
He finds it surprising and pleasing that The Lord of the Rings has had such a success. It seems to him that nowadays almost any kind of fiction is mishandled, through not being sufficiently enjoyed. He thinks that there is now a tendency both to believe and teach in schools and colleges that “enjoyment” is an illiterate reaction; that if you are a serious reader, you should take the construction to pieces; find and analyse sources, dissect it into symbols, and debase it into allegory. Any idea of actually reading the book for fun is lost.
“It seems to me comparable to a man who having eaten anything, from a salad to a complete and well-planned dinner, uses an emetic, and sends the results for chemical analysis.”
He finds the matrix of a quickly-moving, well-written narrative ideal for presenting and developing character, dialogue, and background, the flesh and clothing which cover the skeleton of plot; many people do not realize how much they can enjoy what is simply a well-told story.
“What about the view that some people have, that The Lord of the Rings is really the allegory of an atomic holocaust?” I asked him.
“That’s absolutely absurd. Absurd. These wretched people who must find an allegory in everything! For one thing, a good deal of it was written before the nineteen-thirties.” And he began to explain the ordering of the composition of his work.
The legendary cycle of the Silmarillion, to which The Lord of the Rings is a sequel was begun in 1917, with the “Fall of Gondolin,” which he wrote while convalescing on sick leave from the army.
In general plot, and in several major episodes, most of the cycle was already constructed before 1930, and before the publication of The Hobbit. (There are references within The Hobbit to Glamdring and Orcrist, the elvish swords, as being made in Gondolin, before its fall, for the goblin wars.)
“The choice of the ring as a link with the older stuff was inevitable. Most of the allusions to older legends scattered about the tale, or summarized in Appendix A are to things which really have an existence of some kind in the history of which The Lord of the Rings is part.
“There’s one exception that puzzles me—Berúthiel. I really don’t know anything of her—you remember Aragorn’s allusion in Book I to the cats of Queen Berúthiel, that could find their way home on a blind night? She just popped up, and obviously called for attention, but I don’t really know anything certain about her; though, oddly enough, I have a notion that she was the wife of one of the ship-kings of Pelargir. She loathed the smell of the sea, and fish, and the gulls. Rather like Skadi, the giantess, who came to the gods in Valhalla, demanding a recompense for the accidental death of her father. She wanted a husband. The gods all lined up behind a curtain, and she selected the pair of feet that appealed to her most. She thought she’d got Baldur, the beautiful god, but it turned out to be Njord, the sea-god, and after she’d married him, she got absolutely fed up with the seaside life, and the gulls kept her awake, and finally she went back to live in Jotunheim.
“Well, Berúthiel went back to live in the inland city, and went to the bad (or returned to it—she was a black Númenorean in origin, I guess). She was one of these people who loathe cats, but cats will jump on them and follow them about—you know how sometimes they pursue people who hate them? I have a friend like that. I’m afraid she took to torturing them for amusement, but she kept some and used them—trained them to go on evil errands by night, to spy on her enemies or terrify them.”
I should very much have liked to hear more about Queen Berúthiel, who sent a pleasant grue down my spine-it is not often you have the chance to listen to an entirely new story from your favourite storyteller.
But, as Professor Tolkien had said, he did not really know much more to tell me; and time was running short, and I was anxious to know what he thought of other schools of writing that run roughly parallel with his own, in particular fantasy and science fiction.
