How Tolkien Built His Mythology Gradually

PBS’s Art Beat blog ran an interview with Jason Fisher about J. R. R. Tolkien’s creative process, starting with his language study:

Once Tolkien had made a thorough study of the history of English and its literary artifacts, he discovered the native English had actually lost their mythology when the French came during the Norman conquest. So Tolkien became interested in trying to figure out whether he could restore some of that mythology. Eventually he gave up the idea that he would be restoring an actual mythology for England. But this mythological backdrop continued to permeate everything that he wrote for the rest of his life.

Tolkien’s paternal ancestors apparently arrived in England half a millennium after the Norman Conquest, but he identified with the earlier Anglo-Saxons. The notion that England lost its original Good Things to the Norman Conquest was also part of Whig political thinking in the eighteenth century. So in that respect The Lord of the Rings is a cultural cousin of the Declaration of Independence, sharing an intellectual root.

Fisher also notes that The Hobbit was originally more tweely English and contemporary in its first edition:

Tolkien was actually an inveterate niggler. He constantly tinkered with his works. For most people, The Hobbit that they know today is the version that includes all of these changes and revision. But if you read the first edition of The Hobbit you see all kinds of strange things, like references to policemen on bicycles, references to Lilliputians, a reference to the Gobi Desert, the wild wireworms of the Chinese, all of these references to the real world. After the first edition, Tolkien cut all of those references and made it more of its own separate world.

Eventually, it appears, Tolkien tumbled to the fact that he was creating a mythology not for England but for himself.

Gandalf the Oppressor?

From Damien G. Walter’s unfathomably headlined article “Is science fiction literature's first international language?” in the Guardian:

Russian SF has a long and well-documented history as an outlet for political perspectives that were otherwise repressed. But it is as a critique of the values of western capitalism that the genre has recently caught attention.

The Last Ringbearer by Kirill Eskov is set in the Middle Earth of JRR Tolkien, immediately after the climatic [sic] battle of The Return of the King, and has recently been issued in its second edition translation free online, despite objections from the Tolkien estate. The book reimagines Lord of the Rings as a history written by the victors, with Mordor recast as an emergent industrial nation crushed under the heel of a war-mongering western alliance lead by Gondor, and Gandalf described as "engineering a final solution to the Mordorian problem".

If this mirrors a large proportion of European / Russian history it seems entirely valid, given how easily exactly the same reading can be made of Tolkien's fantasy epic.

Now is this really a critique of Lord of the Rings or a rip-off of it? Or does a rip-off constitute a form of political critique of such a dominant intellectual property?

What does it mean to identify with orcs, even if you present them as misrepresented? Is the “war-mongering western alliance” that Eskov and Walter see the Axis or NATO?

Conflicting Recollections of Prof. Tolkien

In his book The Wand and the Word: Conversations with Writers of Fantasy, literary scholar Leonard S. Marcus asked a number of established fantasy writers about their influences, particularly J. R. R. Tolkien.

Diana Wynne Jones (born in 1934) and Susan Cooper (born in 1935) attended Oxford University at about the same time, and they gave Marcus completely different memories of Tolkien.

Cooper said:

I never met him, but I went to his lectures on Anglo-Saxon literature, along with hundreds of other students. He was a wonderful lecturer. Like C. S. Lewis, whose lectures I also attended, he was a tweedy, pipe-smoking, middle-aged man. We were all waiting for the third volume of The Lord of the Rings to come out.

But Jones told Marcus:

I went to his public lectures. They were absolutely appalling. In those days a lecturer could be paid for his entire course even if he lost his audience, provided he turned up for the first lecture. I think that Tolkien made quite a cynical effort to get rid of us so he could go home and finish writing The Lord of the Rings.

He gave his lectures in a very, very small room and didn’t address us, his audience, at all. In fact he looked the other way, with his face almost squashed up against the blackboard. He spoke in a mutter. His mind was on finishing The Lord of the Rings, and he was really musing to himself about the nature of narrative.

But I found this so fascinating that I came back week after week, as did one other person. I’ve always wondered what became of him, because he was obviously equally fascinated. And because we stuck there, Tolkien couldn’t go away and write Lord of the Rings!

He would say the most marvelous things about the way you take a very basic plot and twitch it here and twitch it there—and it becomes a completely different plot.

Perhaps these writers are remembering different series of lectures, and Tolkien was more engaged in the topic of Anglo-Saxon than in his “public lectures.” Perhaps Cooper’s memory of Tolkien is mixed with her memory of Lewis, whom Jones recalls as a polished, popular speaker in a large, packed auditorium.