Tolkienian Style

*The Lord of the Rings* Challenge, week one

I love these old Ballantine paperback covers because they feature Tolkien’s own art.

In the third chapter of Book One of The Fellowship of the Ring, “Three Is Company,” there is a narrative moment that would not have been out of place in The Hobbit, or even in C. S. Lewis’s Narnia books. On the first night of their journey, Frodo and his companions, Sam and Pippin, sleep out of doors, setting no watch, within just a few miles of home in Hobbiton:

A fox passing through the wood on business of his own stopped several minutes and sniffed.

“Hobbits!” he thought. “Well, what next? I have heard of strange doings in this land, but I have seldom heard of a hobbit sleeping out of doors under a tree. Three of them! There’s something mighty queer about this.” He was quite right, but he never found out any more about it. (72)

This feels like an excerpt from a children’s story, and in a sense, it is exactly that, even though LOTR as a whole is not a children’s story. What the book is, however, is a concatenation of various narrative modes and styles, and the style of any given narrative moment depends upon its environment, both natural and characterological. In this case, there are only hobbits present, along with the thoughtful fox, and we are well within the boundaries of the Shire, and so the narrative voice and prose style require something quite different from what we might find, say, among the elves in Rivendell or the men of Rohan.

While Tolkien often receives critical praise for his fantastical imagination, his philological dexterity, and his world building, his ability as a prose stylist is sometimes overlooked. This is, however, where he usually succeeds where most of his imitators fail miserably: he very carefully adjusts his prose style, and even his generic conventions and assumptions, according to the narrative circumstances.

This goes beyond dialogue. Of course, hobbits speak differently from elves or dwarves. (Perhaps most interesting in terms of their characteristic dialogue are orcs, but we will save that for later.) The voice of the narrator changes as well. Here, it is close to the cheerful travelling companion that we find in The Hobbit, imagining a fox “on business of his own,” who wonders about these hobbits.

Compare this passage from just a few chapters later, chosen almost at random, as the hobbits, now joined by Merry, make their way through the Old Forest:

Strange furtive noises ran among the bushes and reeds on either side of them; and if they looked up to the pale sky, they caught sight of queer gnarled and knobbly faces that gloomed dark against the twilight, and leered down at them from the high bank and the edges of the wood. They began to feel that all this country was unreal, and that they were stumbling through an ominous dream that led to no awakening. (121)

While our company is still composed exclusively of hobbits, we are now beyond the borders of the Shire, into strange territory, where the flora and fauna are less comprehensible, less domesticated, and any talking (or coherently thinking) foxes would be utterly out of place. The tone is much darker, more unsettling, less jovial. Later on, at various narrative points, the narrative voice will sound like an historian, or a nature writer, or an epic poet, or an antiquarian in turn, depending on the moment.

This flexibility of voice and tone is the single most important factor in the continued success of the book over the past seven decades. It’s all about Tolkien’s prose style.

Yes, that’s right. I’ll stand by that claim. I don’t mean to suggest that plot and character and world-building are not important. Of course, all of these elements are vital. But without this mastery of style and tone, they would all go for naught. This is a point that many early critics of the book failed to recognize, and Tolkien clapped back to them in the Foreword to the Second Edition.

The Foreword is a remarkable document: it is Tolkien’s complicated response to LOTR’s critical reception, both positive and negative. It includes his famous remarks about allegory (which I discuss in this week’s bonus piece for paid subscribers); it recounts briefly how the book came into being; and it gives a sense of Tolkien’s literary preferences. Most entertaining is his considerable snark:

Some who have read the book, or at any rate have reviewed it, have found it boring, absurd, or contemptible; and I have no cause to complain, since I have similar opinions of their works, or of the kinds of writing that they evidently prefer. (xxiii)

The amusing implication that some of those who have reviewed the book have not read it indicates his parallel lack of interest in reading the books lauded by such critics. (Oscar Wilde suggested that it was no more necessary to read the entirety of a bad book in order to review it than it would be to drink an entire cask of wine in order to decide whether or not it is good.) His choice of critical adjectives, however, is interesting: “boring” (presumably too long, filled with too much information unnecessary to the plot), “absurd” (presumably referring to its fantastical, “unrealistic” nature), and “contemptible” (probably a matter of style).

These assessments are related: those who think that the content is absurd would also think it boring to spend so much time with it, and would likely consider an appropriate literary style for such content hopelessly unfashionable. In a letter from September 1955 to a critic who had complained about his archaic style, Tolkien demonstrates the absurdity of having a character like Theoden, for example, speak as if he were a modern person, sounding like Bertie Wooster while chatting with Gandalf: “Not at all my dear G.”

In my estimation, however, Tolkien’s ear for the appropriate style at the each point in his narrative is close to flawless, and the critical darlings of the time (Salinger? Nabokov? Golding? Hemingway?) would have been utterly incapable of the sort of prose necessary for such a book. (Well, perhaps Nabokov could have pulled it off, but it would have come across as brilliantly ironic.)

Ah, Nabokov. The more I think about it, the more it makes me laugh to imagine LOTR written in Nabokovian style. Could someone please write this for me? You masters of fiction and narrative style? A. Jay Adler? Terry Freedman? Eleanor Anstruther? Mary Tabor?

To show what I mean, let’s look at three consecutive chapters (or, rather, the Prologue and the first two chapters), which are all stylistically quite different from each other and yet all work perfectly in context:

Prologue

The subtitle to the first part of the Prologue is an immediate stylistic marker: “Concerning Hobbits.” This places the text in the stylistic mode of a certain strain of nineteenth-century English antiquarianism, which traced folk traditions, place names, and oddities of certain English regions or counties—a sort of local philological or scholarly pursuit: “Concerning Traditional Bee-Keeping Techniques in Kent and How They Differ from Those of Surrey,” or “Concerning Aphorisms in the North Yorkshire Dialect,” or “Concerning River Names in the Northwest Midlands, with Special Emphasis on Welsh Influence.” (FYI: I made up these examples—laziness!)

The Prologue lets readers know right away that they are not about to begin a modern novel, or at least not what they would have previously recognized as one. Indeed, it seems more like a travel guide to a nonexistent place, or a sort of pre-social-science anthropological description of an imaginary society, complete with footnotes, citations, and references to “authorities.” It is strange and amusing, and one can’t quite tell how seriously the author is taking it, but it is clear that he is having fun and is totally committed to this world that he is making. And this world is decidedly not the pseudo-medieval one that we might expect from an Oxford medievalist, but rather something much closer to a pre-industrial, idealized, agrarian English society, combined with certain bourgeois touches (waistcoats, collectible silver spoons, a post office, tea—a drink unheard of in England before the late seventeenth century).

Tolkien’s comfort with this sort of material is clear, because hobbit tastes are largely in accord with his own, and so we can read his survey of the Shire as a kind of gentle self-satire. In a letter to a reader from October 1958, he writes:

I am in fact a Hobbit (in all but size). I like gardens, trees and unmechanized farmlands; I smoke a pipe, and like good plain food (unrefrigerated), but detest French cooking; I like, and even dare to wear in these dull days, ornamental waistcoats. I am fond of mushrooms (out of a field); have a very simple sense of humour (which even my appreciative critics find tiresome); I go to bed late and get up late (when possible). I do not travel much.

In the course of the Prologue, we discover that these preferences and tendencies generally align with typical hobbit behavior. We find out about hobbit social customs, their history, their language, their use of “pipe-weed,” and their previous adventures, in particular the adventures of Bilbo Baggins originally recounted in The Hobbit.

Chapter One: “A Long-Expected Party”

And it is Bilbo to whom we turn our attention in the first chapter, as the narrative voice and the tone shifts to a variation of that of The Hobbit, a shift signaled by the title of the chapter, which is an obvious reference to the first chapter of the earlier book, “An Unexpected Party.” Characteristic of this style are comic asides regarding hobbits’ appetites, their provincialism, and their tendency to gossip, as Bilbo appears as the eccentric country gentleman, beloved (and resented) for his generosity, but treated warily for his somewhat “foreign” tendencies, brought about by his fabled travels to the east, as well as his purported association with elves, dwarves, and wizards.

It is not, however, precisely the style of The Hobbit, for there is one significant difference: as Tom Shippey has pointed out, there are a lot more names—names of towns, surnames, names of regions, inns, rivers, bridges, etc., etc. The Prologue has prepared us for this, with its encyclopedic exposition of the Shire and its inhabitants. The effect of this is to bring the reader, despite the friendly narrative voice, into a wider, deeper, more complex world—beyond the comfortable bedtime story of the earlier book, into a world with fully developed history, geography, and languages. That wider world is clearly in contrast to the hobbits’ xenophobia. As the Gaffer tells his fellow patrons of The Ivy Bush, regarding his son Sam’s interest in what lies beyond the boundaries of the Shire:

“Elves and dragons! I says to him. Cabbages and potatoes are better for me and you. Don’t go getting mixed up in the business of your betters, or you’ll land in trouble too big for you, I says to him. And I might say it to others” . . . (24)

It is also clear that it is this wider world that will shape the coming narrative, however comfortable we may find ourselves in the friendly confines of Bag End.¹

Chapter Two: “The Shadow of the Past”

And it is within Bag End itself that we feel our next stylistic shift, not so much in the third-person narrative voice, but rather in the narrative voice of Gandalf, who becomes the book’s most important story-teller among many. For indeed, the book becomes a narrative of interwoven story-tellers, in which we often pause in the middle of the present action in order to recount the past, both recent and ancient. The style here becomes somber and sober, not antiquated but dignified:

But the Ring was lost. It fell into the Great River, Anduin, and vanished. For Isildur was marching north along the east banks of the River, and near the Gladden Fields he was waylaid by Orcs of the Mountains, and almost all his folk were slain. He leaped into the waters, but the Ring slipped from his finger as he swam, and then the Orcs saw him and killed with arrows.

In its diction, its syntax, and its sentence structure, the style has shifted. Note the paratactic movement from clause to clause and the introduction of unfamiliar proper nouns. Our story has moved far from the Shire both in style and content, even though we are still by the fire at Bag End. He pulls us from the narrative universe of The Hobbit to something new and vaster—and he does this with the narrative material of The Hobbit as well as with the style.

Tolkien has Gandalf reach back into the narrative of the earlier book in order to pull out Bilbo’s encounter with Gollum and shape it into something more significant and ominous. Again, this has been anticipated in the Prologue, in the section entitled “Of the Finding of the Ring.” Here, the third-person narrator tells us that “it is a curious fact this is not the story as Bilbo first told it to his companions” (12).

The reader who goes back to peruse the first edition of The Hobbit will be surprised to find a different version of Chapter 5 to the one that has become familiar since the 1950s. (This variant is available in the appendix to The Annotated Hobbit.) Such is the length to which Tolkien has gone to incorporate this episode into LOTR that he has revised the chapter in order to make the encounter with Gollum more threatening and ominous. In the original version, Gollum shows Bilbo the way out of the maze-like system of caves, having agreed to Bilbo’s request and made his promise, and they say goodbye upon parting.

Tolkien explains the existence of the two different versions through the inconsistency of Bilbo’s story. An unreliable narrator has produced two iterations of the tale, one true and one altered, and both have found their way into variants of the “Red Book,” aka The Hobbit, Bilbo’s memoir. We have incorporated the children’s book into the larger narrative and accounted for narrative inconsistencies with graceful shifts in style and tone.

The brilliance of this incorporation of the two versions of the earlier narrative into “The Shadow of the Past” allows Tolkien a remarkable flexibility for the remainder of Book One—as we have moments of darkness, punctuated by amusing banter and silliness (the insufferable Sackville-Bagginses, the bath song, Tom Bombadil, Frodo’s song later in the Prancing Pony, the hobbit mushroom fetish, etc.). This incorporation also anticipates the incursion of darkness into the Shire itself: Gandalf introduces it in the comfort of Bag End, and in the narrative that follows, the ratio of dark to light shifts gradually.

Conclusions, and next week

While I love the whole book, I have always treasured the pastoral silliness of the early parts of Book One, which I find relaxing to read, almost therapeutic. (I realize that some readers disagree with this assessment and think that the book doesn’t really start until we meet Strider, or even later.) Things get much darker later on, of course, but when I begin the book, I know that I have a few chapters, at least through the Bombadil episode, when I can simply enjoy myself and not worry too much. In writing today’s piece, I set out to define and isolate what it is that allows Tolkien to create this effect so beautifully. Let me know what you think. Do you agree that these opening chapters are entirely delightful, or are you impatient for the “real” narrative to begin? What are your favorite episodes from these opening chapters, and why?

In today’s bonus piece for paid subscribers, I address some other aspects of these opening chapters, in particular Tom Bombadil (whose absence from Peter Jackson’s film broke my heart when I first saw it), as well as some of philological games that Tolkien is playing here.

For next week, we will pick up the thread on the Barrow Downs and read through Book Two, Chapter 2 of The Fellowship of the Ring, “The Council of Elrond”—the book’s longest and most complex chapter.

Thanks for reading, from my fancy internet magic ring to yours.

Picture taken by me in my local coffee shop, which also serves as my second office.

1. In The Road to Middle-Earth, Tom Shippey explicates “Bag End” as an English transliteration of cul-de-sac, literally “the end of a bag.” Shippey points out that the French don’t use this term and that it is a pretentious, bourgeois construction of English social climbing. I disagree, however, with Shippey’s assertion that the name “Sackville-Bagginses” is a failure of tone because of its French derivation. To me, it completes the joke: they are the most pretentious of all hobbits, and on both sides of their hyphen they have “bags.” They are “bagtown-baggers.” Also, their ultimate desire, the acquisition of Bag End, is the “end” or goal of these “bags,” their “cul-de-sac.” I find it hilarious, though probably not one reader in a hundred will catch it.