Rissik and the Literary Value of Creation

            I was fascinated by most of Wednesday’s class. In fact, I think that it would be perfectly possible to hold a ten-week course on about a third of the material that we covered in 80 minutes—Tolkien responds absurdly well to the kind of scholarly reading that we are doing. Anyways, upon reflection I decided that I wanted to respond to the discussion surrounding the Guardian’s two critiques of The Lord of the Rings.

            Eyre’s review, ironically enough, is very much the junk food of literary criticism, and the selections that Professor Fulton Brown read aloud seemed to give the class enough context to appreciate this. He never seriously attempts to respond to Tolkien’s work as such, preferring to toss out a few zingers and a few pieces of cliché culture snobbery. The closest he gets to addressing the book which his review is supposedly concerned with is when he calls the prose “as inert and clogged as thick clay - stick your spade in it and you never get it out.” Having proved his own prose mastery beyond all doubt with that simile, he then returns to literary name-dropping. 
           Andrew Rissik’s review, however, is not an obvious piece of hack work—he is reviewing Shippey’s J.R.R. Tolkien, Author of the Century, which means he has been exposed to a fairly heady draught of Tolkien scholarship, and his piece, short though it is, demonstrates that he has at least seriously considered The Lord of the Rings (the same, alas, cannot be said for Eyre, who obviously had trouble with the “extraordinarily difficult” text). The class seemed ready to dismiss him, understandably enough, and as I recall his contention that LotR lacks a “remotely convincing treatment of… religion” drew a particularly general laugh.

            Was he wrong, though? While the cosmology of Middle Earth certainly incorporates a fascinating and brilliantly conceived spiritual dimension, Eru is never mentioned in The Lord of the Rings, and the Valar get short shrift as well; the closest that Tolkien’s magnum opus comes to a treatment, convincing or otherwise, of religion, is in Gandalf’s occasional hints at a power behind events (as in Chapter 2, where he says that there was “something else at work” behind Bilbo’s discovery of the Ring) and in the rare, acontextual references to Varda that various elves make.

In my mind, Rissik’s point is worth addressing, if only because it represents the consensus of the literary establishment. He claims that “Almost no one [accepts Tolkien as one the greatest writers of the last century], except the hard-core Tolkien addicts,” and while the class (composed, I think we can agree, of the addicts he mentions) disagreed with that assessment, that same class is not cross-listed in English Literature, and does not approach the series from a literary perspective. While Tolkien continues to be an incredibly popular writer, I would argue that Rissik’s characterization of him as merely “popular” would be supported by the majority of “literary” commentators.

What, then, are they missing? A number of things, of course, many of which we will no doubt address in the class, whether or not a literary understanding of Tolkien’s works is our primary goal. One particularly interesting argument against him, however, comes from the supplemental reading assigned for Wednesday’s class, and, in fact, from the very work that Rissik dismisses en route to a more general repudiation of Tolkien as a “serious” writer, that is, Shippey’s Writer of the Century. The section assigned examines “Leaf by Niggle” as an autobiographical allegory (Shippey 268)—a risky endeavor, given Tolkien’s well-known animosity towards allegory, and the fact that he specifically denies an allegorical reading of “Leaf by Niggle” in a letter (#214 from Letters) to his aunt. Nevertheless, Shippey makes a convincing case. In doing so, he also highlights the obvious Catholic allegories present in “Leaf”—the mysterious journey as death, the workhouse as purgatory, and the distant mountains as paradise—and puts them in the context of a further creative allegory, wherein Niggle’s eternal reward is to have his “sub-creation,” as it exists in its ideal form, recognized by the great Creator (Shippey 276).

Here, then, is a convincing treatment of religion, of the sort that critics like Rissik would accept as “real literature.” In fact, Rissik does acknowledge the religious aspects of Tolkien’s work as “not ignoble,” writing that he and Lewis “Locate their image of God in the same emotional places: in the sensuous, pre-industrial beauty of an invented natural world.” What he evidently does not understand, even after reading Shippey’s book, is that this same faith in fact suffuses The Lord of the Rings, providing not only the inspiration for the story’s forests but the raison d’être for the act of creation itself. Rissik calls Middle Earth a “maze of whimsical fantasy,” but it is by no means whimsical. Tolkien’s genius, or much of it, lies in his invention, and the mode of invention which he pioneered in The Lord of the Rings—that which he discusses in “On Fairy-Stories” and which we analyzed in our examination of that text—is the result of a complex and involved philosophy, and constitutes a very serious engagement with religious issues. If the criterion for literary merit is, as Rissik claims, a treatment of “fundamental human concerns” like religion and philosophy, his evaluation of The Lord of the Rings is sorely lacking. As for his claim about its failure to address “the conduct of sexual relationships”—he has a point.

--Charlie Bullock