I didn’t read The Hobbit while I was at school. I remember sixth-form friends talking about it, but I was already into James Joyce’s Ulysses.
A few years later though, while at college, I did read Lord of the Rings, and became a fan. I went on to read The Hobbit then, which, of course, made it for me not so much a stepping stone to the larger book, but a step down to a much lesser one.
College years during the early nineteen seventies cast Tolkien’s Middle Earth as a sort of hippie realm; a semi-magical world of adventure and medieval, even ancient mythology. Treebeard and the living wood created a ‘Green’ glow, in both senses of the word. Yet even amidst all this fantasy I got the sense that Middle Earth was perhaps the most dominant character in the book, and that it was also a thinly veiled metaphor for rural England. I don’t know how Scots feel about it, but though I’ve travelled extensively in their country I’ve never felt a Middle Earth connection. In the Midlands England I grew up in, and the Northern England I emigrated to, Middle Earth popped up again and again.
In fact, in those early readings of the book I was content to experience the story as if the landscape and its implied adventures were all that was there. A college lecturer called halt to that by proposing that the book was badly written. This idea was so heretical it shook my faith in him, for a while. He was a bright bunny. Insisting on doing my final English thesis on a minor American author he hadn’t read, he insisted I compare the man to a greater one that I hadn’t. A couple of weeks later he could run rings round me on both.
Yet, to suggest that Lord of the Rings was badly written! The suggestion has haunted me ever since. The implication of it, I thought, was that its popularity was thus questionable, though now I doubt that would have been my lecturer’s point. Writers, editors and critics might care about how well a story is written, but readers, I suspect, rarely do. With them it’s content that wins the day, not form.
It was in the early eighties I think that Brian Sibley scripted the BBC Radio version of the novel and suddenly the landscape of Middle Earth was eclipsed by the sound of its voices, and those voices hammered home the truth that the book was conceived and written in and about a class ridden society.
Every orc in the story speaks with the accent of the London mob. The ‘good’ peasant, Samwise Gamgee, has a sort of rural speech. The Hobbit adventurers whom he serves speak a self conscious RP, especially when they are talking about their class and where it fits in to the book’s hierarchies. In the final sequence, hinted at but not played out in the films, it is ‘ruffians’ who invade the shire, and I wonder to what extent, for Tolkien, the ruffians were us seen from the white towers of academe?
And behind those English class-labelling voices sits, hidden in plain sight, the fact that this book, perceived as being about the battle between good and evil and transformed into a film along those lines, is really a promotion of the idea of hereditary monarchy.
Tolkien’s Aragorn might have the qualities that a good king needs, but the author makes it explicit that he is the ‘rightful’ king because of who, not what he is. He even has that old medieval magic of the ‘king’s touch’ which heals the sick. In the film this diluted to an apothecary’s trick that anyone could pull, but the book plays up the medieval monarchical mystery.
Tolkien’s hero is taking back what is rightly his, knowing that his time has come. He earns the victory, but does not earn the right to the kingship. It is already his. It is not a sword that is brought to him at the weapon take before he takes the paths of the dead, but the banner of his family, and with it the secret army of his household that has worked for years towards the Restoration of the kingship. Assuming the crown after the victory over Sauron he is accepted by his subjects, but they recognise rather than chose him. There is no choice but to submit, or resist. He is the ‘rightful king’ either way. The Lord of the Rings is not a novel that promotes democracy. One of the arch villains, Saruman, is dangerous fundamentally because of his voice, and he uses it like a modern politician, to delude the mob and to seduce his peers.
The Hobbits Merry and Pippin, both learn and explicitly accept the place into society into which they have been born. It’s an idea that the Edwardian working class parents who brought me up would have understood, and also would have accepted. It’s the attitude that pervades the British Establishment, with the proviso that it is a club that is open for new members so long as they too will conform to its attitudes.
