Shaggy Dog's tall tale Book

The title of this book is not as overblown as it sounds; Shippey is making the case for Tolkien as "an author of the century, the twentieth century, responding to the issues and the anxieties of that century." He puts Tolkien in a group of influential "traumatized authors" who tended to write fantasy and fable because they were convinced that this was the only way to address their experiences. Shippey also discusses Tolkien's ancient sources. I'm familiar with a few of them (Beowulf, some other Anglo-Saxon poems, parts of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight) and there are some I'm interested in but haven't read yet (especially the Icelandic sagas).

The first section, on The Hobbit, is mostly an analysis of Tolkien's style and his sources. Several of the riddles from Bilbo and Gollum's riddle-contest can be traced to Old English and Old Norse. This section also examines the clash of of heroic and modern styles of language and ideals. Shippey points out that at the end, Bilbo and the dwarves say the same thing in completely different language:
"If ever you visit us again, when our hals are made fair once more, then the feast shall indeed be splendid!'"
"If ever you are passing my way," said Bilbo, "don't wait to knock! Tea is at four; but any of you are welcome at any time!"

The Hobbit is also where Tolkien introduced his ideas about courage. Bilbo's courage "is not aggressive or hot-blooded. It is internalized, solitary, dutiful - and distinctively modern, for there is nothing like it in Beowulf or the Eddic poems or Norse saga. Just the same, it is courage of a sort, and even heroes and warriors ought to come to respect it (28).

The Lord of the Rings section is divided into three chapters. The first, "Mapping out a plot," discusses Tolkien's writing process when he wrote LotR and some aspects of his writing style. Shippey looks at Tolkien's use of different modes of speech to suggest cultural variation between the different speakers at the Council of Elrond. He points out that Saruman talks like a politician: "There need not be, there would not be, any real change in our designs, only in our means." Shippey writes: "When people say things like 'no real change' the mean there is going to be a major change, but they would like you to pretend it is minor; and too often we do. Saruman is the most contemporary figure in Middle-earth, both politically and linguistically" (76).

This chapter also discusses the culture of the Rohirrim. There's an interesting bit of etymology: Tolkien worked out what the natives of Mercia (a Latinized name) would have called their kingdom, and came up with 'Marc,' pronounced 'the Mark.' The Rohirrim "do not have the rigid codes of obedience of a modern army, or a modern bureaucracy. . . they are freer to make their own minds up, and regard this as a duty. They surrender less of their independence to their superiors than we do; and Tolkien makes us realize that even if they are relatively 'uncivilized,' indeed still at a barbarian stage of development, this is not all bad."

The second chapter on The Lord of the Rings is called "Concepts of Evil." Shippey points out that premodern societies did not have the skepticism of power present in Tolkien's work and that of his contemporaries: "people probably thought that evil possessors of power were evil by nature, and from the beginning" (115). This chapter also discusses the two views of evil that are in tension in Tolkien's work. The Boethian view holds that there is no such thing as evil. What seems to be evil is only the absence of good. The Manichean view holds that "the world is a battlefield between the powers of Good and Evil, equal and opposite -- so that, one might say, there is no real difference between them, and it is a matter of chance which side one happens to choose" (134). Of course, LotR would be simplified if this conflict were resolved; if the Ring were merely an absence of good, then it could only work on internal evil, and could simply be put aside. If it were only an external force, then anyone could have destroyed the Ring.

The "theory of courage" that Tolkien discussed in his 1936 Beowulf lecture. In Norse myth (and Tolkien believed something similar must have existed in Old English) it was believed that the world would end in a final confrontation between good and evil, as in the traditional Christian myth. The difference was that the Norse end of the world - called Ragnarok, the destruction of the gods - the forces of evil won.

Shippey asks: "If the gods and their allies are going to lose, and this is known to everyone, what in the world would make anyone want to join that side?" (150). The answer - what Tollkien called "the potent but terrible solution" of Norse myth - was that "victory or defeat have nothing to do with right and wrong" (150). In this way Northern mythology sets a higher standard than Christianity. Tolkien "wanted his characters to live up to the same high standard, and was careful therefore to remove easy hope from them" (150). Tolkien's hobbits have a cheerful attitude "which far from speculating about its chances on Doomsday refuses ever to look into the future at all." This is not optimism, since it keeps them going even when they have no real hope.

The third chapter on The Lord of the Rings is called "The Mythic Dimension." Shippey discusses some historical parallels to the events in The Lord of the Rings, but he also shows that it doesn't have anything like one-to-one historical parallels with WWI or WWII. He does point out the parallel between the status of Vichy France and what Sauron offers to Gondor and its allies if they surrender. Shippey also discusses the Scouring of the Shire episode as a critique of the drive for efficiency which is "not only soulless but also inefficient" (168).

This chapter also connects Denethor's resistance to change to contemporary fears of nuclear war. Denethor cannot tolerate the idea of things being different than they have been all his life, and if he cannot have what he wants he will 'have naught.' Shippey: "By the time The Lord of the Rings was published, of course, it was the first time possible for political leaders to say they would 'have naught' and make it come true" (173). He points out that Denethor represents "the major late twentieth century fear, leaders with a death wish who have given up on conventional weapons" (174).

The Silmarillion section starts by explaining how Tolkien found inspiration in some of the ambiguous details of Northern European mythology. Tolkien took the distinction between 'Light Elves' and 'Dark Elves' from Norse mythology and created Quenya as the language of the former and Sindarin as the language of the latter. The conflicts between different divisions of Elves recall the family feuds in Icelandic sagas. Shippey also discusses the story of Turin and the tension between his responsibility for his decisions vs the influence of fate. I've read The Silmarillion, so I knew this already, but Shippey provides a good introduction for those who haven't read it. (Verlyn Flieger's Splintered Light is on my TBR because I'd like to read a more in-depth examination of The Silmarilion sometime.)

Shippey writes that The Silmarillion's focus on the sins of possessiveness and power make it "less a mythology for England and more one for its own time, for the twentieth century: a myth re-told, with proper respect for what in myth is unchanging, because myths always need retelling." Ever since I first read The Silmarillion, I've felt that The Lord of the Rings is not quite complete without it. LotR has a (qualified) happy ending, and uses this as an argument for the belief that there is a grand plan in which everything works out, in the end. The Silmarillion also makes this argument, but without the happy ending; Tolkien holds nothing back here, even when it would make his position easier to accept.

There's also a chapter on Tolkien's shorter works, most of which I'm not really interested in. (Except Farmer Giles of Ham, which is hilarious, and makes a point about the value of old stories.) Some of these are the kind of allegorical stories that Tolkien usually avoided.

The Afterword, "The followers and the critics" discusses some criticisms of Tolkien and his influence on modern fantasy. Shippey points out that Tolkien uses several devices that are accepted as modernist, but his motives are different from other writers "because they are on principle *not literary.* He used mythical method not because it was an interesting method but because he believed that the myths were true. He showed his characters wandering in the wilderness and entirely mistaken in their guesses not because he wanted to shatter the 'realist illusion' of fiction but because he believed everyone is in a way wandering in a bewilderment, lost in the star-occluded forest of Middle-earth. He experimented with language not to see what interesting effects could be produced but because he thought all forms of human language were already an experiment."

The discussion of Tolkien's "followers" is sort of depressing; it confirms my suspicion that a lot of writers of epic fantasy are too close to Tolkien even when they claim to be doing something different. It's why I mostly read other kinds of fantasy. Some of the writers he mentions sound interesting though. I haven't read most of them, except Ursula Le Guin and a little bit of Jack Vance.