The Same Tale Still: What We Gain From Imagining Tolkien as History

Today, the Lord of the Rings is widely heralded as one of the greatest fantasy stories of all time, an incredible feat of creativity and imagination. It’s widely accepted that although Tolkien’s world is masterfully detailed and believable, the events of his stories aren’t “real” in the typical sense: being the inventions of a single man, they obviously are not reflective of true world history. What I therefore found most interesting in the process of learning more about Tolkien, especially in reading through his letters, were the ways in which Tolkien did in fact believe his stories to be real.

In his letter to his publisher Milton Waldman (Letter 131), Tolkien lays out his mission statement: inspired by the mythologies of other cultures (e.g. Norse, Greek), and the lack of a corresponding canon for England, Tolkien expressed a desire to construct a national mythology for England, based on his extensive research as a professor at Oxford. If Tolkien’s words are to be taken completely at face value, then the entire world of LOTR, indeed everything he ever wrote, is his conjecture of England’s distant past, just as much a scholarly endeavour as a creative one. Just as the LOTR trilogy takes place during the “Third Age” of Middle Earth, his and our modern era, the 20th and 21st centuries, would be the “Seventh Age” of this world. Therefore (outlandish as the notion may seem!), we too are a part of the story of the LOTR—entering into the same world as the Elves and Hobbits and Wizards, only doing so long after they have departed.

There is a scene in the LOTR (chapter 8, Book IV) where Sam and Frodo come to this same exact conclusion. Huddled in the dark in the mountains of Cirith Urgol, Sam recounts the tale of the Silmaril, detailed in the Silmarillion, paralleling Beren’s plight in Thangorodrim to his and Frodo’s present situation. Upon realizing that the star-glass around Frodo’s neck contains the same light as the Silmaril, Sam has an epiphany: he too is living within the story that he is telling. This astounds Sam: the Silmarillion, to these Hobbits from the Shire, probably feels as distant and fantastical as LOTR feels to us.“Why, to think of it, we’re in the same tale still!” Sam exclaims. “It’s going on. Don’t the great tales never end?” Frodo’s response to this is profound: “No, they never end as tales,” he says. “But the people in them come and go when their part’s ended.” (Lord of the Rings, 697).

The emotional response I had reading this chapter, and the emotions Sam and Frodo must have felt coming to that realization, are similar to what I experienced reading Tolkien’s letter. I know that his novels are works of fiction, originating from his imagination; but in shifting my perspective to go along with Tolkien, in fully understanding the implications of his argument ("this is real"), I nonetheless felt wonder and awe at the possibility. Because what if we do all exist in the same story as these characters, these kings and heroes and villains and wars? How vast it would feel, how much more monumental our small roles, knowing what company we'd be in.

On a craft level, Tolkien the philologist’s natural path into this highly ambitious project was through language. Throughout all of his writing, he maintains an internal consistency of logic in the names of places, people, objects, and more. Every original Tolkienian word is connected to a wider web of etymology that grounds his world in a sense of very real history. For example, in the existing fragments from “The Lost Road,” the origin of the land of Númenor, many characters’ names (e.g. Alboin, Audoin) were taken from Lombardic kings in English history. There are also songs in the LOTR that seem to echo into our modern world: a longer version of the children’s nursery rhyme Hey Diddle Diddle, for example, appears in chapter 9 of Book 1, sung by Frodo at the Prancing Pony inn. Finally, Tolkien’s use of a frame tale, the Red Book of Westmarch, does much to make LOTR feel like real history. By positioning the LOTR novels as a translation/transcription of a manuscript Tolkien happened to find, originally written by the very characters in the story, the entire chronicle becomes a discovery rather than a novel creation. This also parallels the scholarly process of many historians. All of these details lend credence to the idea that our world and Tolkien’s are, secretly, one and the same.

It makes me wonder: someday, far down the line, after all of our parts in the story have ended, if a future society of humans were to rediscover Tolkien’s works, could they believe it to be some version of true history? It might seem far-fetched, but I think Tolkien’s care in grounding LOTR in reality places it just far enough into that gray area between reality and fantasy that it could happen. Even when discussing Tolkien's belief in his story's reality during class, I had moments of maybe, where this world seemed to transcend a fantasy novel created by a man in the 20th century and rather became a plausible origin story for England. "Secondary World" fantasy typically refers to stories existing in an entirely alternate world to our own, but Tolkien's trick of linking the world of LOTR to our modern one means that LOTR is neither strictly Secondary World nor Primary/Real World history. We are both inside the story and outside of it, participants and spectators to this tale.

This role we fill, through reading and discussing and even creating within the realm of LOTR, potentially transforms us into Elf-Friends. An Elf-Friend, in relation to Tolkien, is defined as one who acts as a bridge between worlds: an insider and outsider at once, both a participant in and the Teller of the tale. Characters like Sam, Frodo, and Bilbo are all Elf-Friends. Outside of the books, Tolkien is definitely an Elf-Friend; and I'd argue his son Christopher, who dedicated long hours to excavating and preserving his father’s work, compiling all he could to give to the world, is an Elf-Friend as well. Christopher exists both inside the story of his father (as Tolkien’s son) and also outside of it (as the compiler of his notes and, in the words of Verlyn Flieger, the “Teller to the Tale” (The Footsteps of Aelfwine, 185)). Acting as a Teller to a Tale is also an act of Love; you only revisit a story, especially after losing parts of it, if you love it enough to want to preserve it. In daring to make sure it is remembered, an Elf-Friend keeps the story alive, so that more can experience—as Frodo and Sam did in the dark, and as so many of us have throughout our lives—what it is like to be "in the same tale still."

- AXY