Talking Tolkien
Graham Foster looks at Anthony Burgess's response to the chronicles of Middle Earth
Admired at one time by a small readership, fantasy fiction has grown into a mainstream industry. Its popularity might have surprised Anthony Burgess, whose scepticism about the genre is documented in some of his published reviews. Perhaps this should come as no surprise: Burgess’s fiction is mostly anchored in the familiar world of solid objects, although a few of his novels imagine dystopian futures, supernatural occurrences, or other strange events.
Burgess’s view of fantasy literature was partly formed when he was teaching in America in the 1970s. This period coincided with a growth in the popularity of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings among students and members of the counter-culture. Musicians of the 1970s, such as Led Zeppelin and Bo Hansson, were inspired by Tolkien’s novels, and this helped to create a youth culture with which Burgess was always out of sympathy. Commenting on Tolkien’s posthumously-published book The Silmarillion in 1977, he wrote: ‘The Lord of the Rings is greatly loved by many, especially young Americans searching for The Alternative Society. I do not know how many of his followers knew him as a scholar, as well as a myth-maker, seeing the connection between his primary vocation and his hobby, or hobbits.’
In Burgess’s view, The Lord of the Rings suffered from being snared by the popular scene of the 1970s. Nevertheless, he admired Tolkien’s scholarly work, especially his edition of the Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, co-edited with Professor Eric Valentine Gordon, who had been his own tutor at Manchester University in the 1930s. Burgess said that this was ‘one of the most beautiful books in the world — a delicious thing to handle as well as to try to read.’ He was impressed by Tolkien’s ability as a linguist, especially his knowledge of Old English and its Germanic variants. He claimed that ‘Tolkien bitterly resented the Norman Conquest. He felt that English could have got along very well without all those Latinisms.’
Burgess was interested in how this deep knowledge helped Tolkien to create new languages, such as Dwarvish and Elvish. Reviewing The Silmarillion, he notes that these languages are ‘fabricated on the most professional philological principles, complete with etymological ignorance.’ As an example of this ‘ignorance’, he uses Tolkien’s own glossary entry for Khazad-dûm, or the Mines of Moria — ‘dûm is probably a plural or collective, meaning “excavations, halls, mansions”.’ Burgess says that Tolkien’s decision to show how his fictional languages had changed over time gives them a satisfying sense of reality.
Like Tolkien, Burgess had a good working knowledge of several modern languages, especially Italian, French, German, Spanish and Swedish. Like Tolkien, he also had a scholarly interest in historical linguistics. In Burgess’s case, this interest led to the creation of fictional languages. Beyond Nadsat — the teenage slang spoken in A Clockwork Orange — he created two other languages based on Chinese and Indo-European, to be spoken by the prehistoric characters in Jean-Jacques Annaud’s film Quest for Fire. He also wrote two theoretical books about the history of language: Language Made Plain (1964) and A Mouthful of Air (1992).
When he moves beyond the linguistic content of Tolkien’s work, Burgess’s patience as a reader is limited. Assessing the world-building in The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion, his criticism becomes ambivalent. Tolkien, he says, ‘seems to have found that there were not enough ancient myths, so was forced to start creating them himself.’ Comparing Tolkien to William Blake, Burgess considers the latter a ‘quirkier, less consistent, world-builder’ who ‘exhilarates because we never know when the real world, distorted by the needs of his symbolism, is going to rush in.’ Tolkien, in comparison, is ‘neither original nor mad enough: he is always the scholar. The real world is sealed out of his college rooms.’
Despite his reservations, Burgess does not dismiss the genuine achievement of Tolkien’s fiction. His review of The Silmarillion shows that he engaged deeply with the work, and he knows his Morgoths from his Valinors. He appreciates the biblical structure of the book and its quasi-religious themes, such as the conflict between good and evil. Ultimately, Burgess considers Tolkien’s fiction in terms of literature, and he attempts to place it in a larger context:
How far does the Tolkien of the Elves, beloved, a best-seller but no Harold Robbins, fit into the whole concept of literature? He is a mule, like Mervyn Peake, begotten but unbegetting. He belongs to fable, which is not quite literature, as much as does the author of Watership Down. I have no doubt at all of the importance of Tolkien the scholar, and if The Lord of the Rings has given pleasure I am glad, but I have the same doubts about its greatness as I have about other sacred books of the campus.
An adversarial critic might argue that Burgess failed to see the point and purpose of Tolkien’s fiction. It is clear that Tolkien’s reputation has completely transcended the academic world, and his scholarly works have been dwarfed by the popular novels about Middle Earth. In our own time, Tolkien continues to find new readers: his work has been adapted into films, television shows, video games, and board games.
When Burgess concluded his review of The Silmarillion by saying that it was ‘necessary buying for the Tolkienians,’ he didn’t predict that this formerly niche group of readers would become an enormous force in the cultural world. But his comments on the books are well formulated, and they raise questions that all serious readers should be willing to consider.
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Order The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien (affiliate link)
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Listen to the Ninety-Nine Novels podcast about The Once and Future King by T.H. White, one of Burgess’s favourite fantasy novels:
I hadn't remembered that AB liked The Once and Future King. I bought it on one of my weekly circuits of the secondhand bookshops of north London, largely because I recognised the author (The Goshawk had been one of my O-level Eng. Lit. set books). It excited me greatly and led me on to La Morte d'Arthur. The Questing Beast with "half a hundred hounds in its belly" has stuck in my memory. Later, buying Disney movies for my son, I found they had cherry picked some scenes for The Sword in the Stone.
TLOTR is all too easily read as an entertainment, and the historical parallels are only going to be obvious to those who know their history—history through which AB had lived and it surprises me that he was not struck by this. I take it he was not one of those who preferred to forget the war, given that he wrote A Vision of Battlements, and I can't think it went over his head, so I have to assume he saw the parallels and thought them weak. Perhaps he was too distracted by the philology to pay attention to the story! You are absolutely correct that fantasy was the poor relative of science fiction in those days (and SF was, I confess, the main reason for my haunting used bookstores in those days, but then I grew up....)