Read Online Tree by Tolkien by Colin Wilson - Free Book Online

A few years ago, I went to have lunch with W.H. Auden in his New York apartment. It was the first time I'd met him, and Norman Mailer had warned me that I might find him difficult to get along with. 'Very reserved, very English—but more so than most Englishmen'; I found this true on the whole—he seems to be very formal, perhaps basically shy. But after we had been eating for ten minutes, he asked me suddenly: 'Do you like The Lord of the Rings? ' I said I thought it was a masterpiece. Auden smiled, 'I somehow thought you would.' The manner softened noticeably, and the lunch proceeded in a more relaxed atmosphere. It is true, as Peter S. Beagle remarked in his introduction to The Tolkien Reader , that Tolkien admirers form a sort of club. Donald Swann is another member—but that is understandable, for his temperament is romantic and imaginative. It is harder to understand why someone as 'intellectual' as Auden should love Tolkien, while other highly intelligent people find him somehow revolting. (When I mentioned to a widely read friend—who is also an excellent critic—that I intended to write an essay on Tolkien, he said: 'Good, it's time somebody really exploded that bubble', taking it completely for granted that it would be an attack.) Angus Wilson told me in 1956 that he thought The Lord of the Rings was 'don's whimsy' (although he may have changed his mind since then).
    I first tried to read the book in about 1954, when only two volumes were out. I already knew a number of people who raved about Tolkien, but who seemed unable to explain precisely why they thought him so significant. I tried the first twenty pages of Volume One, decided this was too much like Enid Blyton, and gave it up for another ten years. In the early sixties, I started to work on a book about imaginative literature, triggered by the discovery of H. P. Lovecraft; John Comley, a psychologist friend (who had himself published a couple of good novels) asked me if I didn't intend to include Tolkien in the book. I said: 'I thought he was pretty dreadful?' 'He's very good.' So I bought the three volume edition of Lord of the Rings , and started to read it in bed one morning. The absurd result was that I stayed in bed for three days, and read straight through it. What so impressed me on that first reading was the self-containedness of Tolkien's world. I suppose there are a few novelists who have created worlds that are uniquely their own—Faulkner, for example, or Dickens. But since their world is fairly close to the actual world, it cannot really be called a unique creation. The only parallel that occurs to me is the Wagner Ring cycle, that one can only enter as if taking a holiday on a strange planet.
    I have read the book through a couple of times since—once aloud to my children. On re-reading, one notices the sentimentality. I could really do with less of Tom Bombadil, and Gimli's endless talk about the Lady of Lothlorien; but it hardly detracts from the total achievement. But on the second reading, I also noticed how Tolkien achieves the basic effect of the book—by slipping in, rather quietly, passages of 'fine writing'. Not really 'purple passages' in the manner of some of the Victorians (the 'Penny Whistle' chapter of Meredith's Richard Feverel is the obvious example). They are too unobtrusive for that. 'Almost at once the sun seemed to sink into the trees behind them. They thought of the slanting light of evening glittering on the Brandywine River, and the windows of Bucklebury beginning to gleam with hundreds of lights. Great shadows fell across them; trunks and branches of trees hung dark and threatening over the path. White mists began to rise and curl on the surface of the river and stray about the roots of the trees upon its borders. Out of the very ground at their feet a shadowy steam arose and mingled with the swiftly falling dusk.'
    This is from 'The Old Forest' chapter, and in a sense it is functional. There is nothing here as