Fantastic Metropolis

©1966 by James Cawthorn

It is, of course, perfectly possible to find fault with The Lord of the Rings. No work is faultless, least of all fiction, which depends as painting does on the individual imagination as creator, and on the acceptance of other individual imaginations. You may not like this kind of romantic fantasy. Certainly there are passages in which the humour is a little Boys’ Own Paperish—the hot baths in the house at Crickhollow, for instance, when most of the water is splashed on the floor. Yet this is preceded by one of the most menacing passages any writer of suspense could produce—the moment when they look back, crossing the river on the ferry-boat, and see a figure that looks like a bundle left behind. “[...] It seemed to move and sway this way and that, as if searching the ground. It then crawled, or went crouching, back into the gloom beyond the lamps.” M.R. James had this particular skill, and very few other writers. And immediately after the bath episode, they set off and travel through the forest, where they are continuously forced away from the path they wish to take. “They all got an uncomfortable feeling that they were being watched with disapproval, deepening to dislike and even enmity. [...] The cry fell as if muffled by a heavy curtain. There was no echo or answer though the wood seemed to become more crowded and more watchful than before.”

The characters, too, can be rather too jolly, childlike, and primitive, especially Sam, whose fierce devotion at times becomes oppressive. But they all seem to me to grow and develop nobly, from the exciteable, jocular, setting-out-is-fun crowd at the beginning of the first book, The Fellowship of the Ring, until by the end of the third book, The Return of the King, some have become heroic figures, and all have gained breadth and sadness and wisdom. The work itself has no neatly rounded, complete happy ending. Frodo is too sorely hurt to return fully to his own world, and in the end passes overseas with Elrond and Galadriel, at the end of the Third Age.

Even in the wedding of Aragorn and Arwen there are seeds of sorrow, for Arwen is of Elf-kin, and must give up her right to pass over the seas, when Aragorn at last dies.

There is always the knowledge, in the story, that this is only the Third Age of the World; that other battles have been fought with the Enemy in the past, in other shapes; and that there are more Ages of the World to come.

As Sam says, under the shadows of Cirith Ungol: “But that’s a long tale, of course, and goes on past the happiness and into grief, and beyond it—and the Silmaril went on and came to Eärendil. And why, sir, I never thought of that before! We’ve got—you’ve got some of the light of it in that star-glass that the Lady gave you! Why, to think of it, we’re in the same tale still! It’s going on. Don’t the great tales ever end?”

The addicts of Professor Tolkien’s works, I think, would be quite happy if this particular cycle of stories never did end. The news that there are more stories to come will certainly please as many people as much as it did me. It was a remarkable and intoxicating experience to talk to a writer who is still so closely a part of the new mythology which he has begun for us; and if I have tried, by including as many delectable quotations from him as possible, to lure new addicts in, I hope that I may be forgiven.

This interview first appeared in New Worlds, November, 1966.