Tree by Tolkien Read Free

writer whose work is never mentioned by respectable critics: Jeffrey Farnol. His first book, The Broad Highway , came out in 1910, and brought him overnight fame, running into endless impressions. Farnol used the same plot again and again, always with a certain success, for it possesses a potent charm—the young man setting out on the open road with a few shillings in his pocket, in search of romance, adventure and fortune. The 'adventures'—with highwaymen, Bow Street runners, wicked squires (who have kidnapped fair ladies), bad-tempered pugilists, Regency bucks—may be absurd, and, after the first few books, repetitive, but the real power of the story springs from the poetry of freedom: the hero striding cheerfully along dark lanes in the starlight, watching the sky turn pale and hearing the first birds, then stopping to wash in a brook before he approaches the country inn with the smell of frying bacon floating through the windows... . Anyone who read Farnol in his teens will never forget him. He must have tempted many children to run away from home. Tolkien was eighteen when The Broad Highway appeared; I find it inconceivable that he did not read the book and find it absorbing. Another influence—of Anglo-Saxon and mediaeval poetry—is altogether more obvious, and, in my view, less important. Tolkien began as a philologist; his first publication was A Middle English Vocabulary in 1922, and his second, an edition of the mediaeval romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight , (with E. V. Gordon, 1925). There was also an essay on Chaucer as Philologist (1934), an essay on Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics (1937) and an imitation Anglo-Saxon poem The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, Beorhthelm's Son , (1953). Edmund Wilson quotes a statement prepared for his publishers in which Tolkien refers to The Lord of the Rings as a philological game. 'The "stories" were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse.' This, it seems to me, is a red-herring, like James's description of The Turn of the Screw as 'a fairy-tale, pure and simple'. Tolkien may well have derived enormous pleasure from giving the book another dimension of realism with the invention of Elvish and other 'languages', but this modest statement of its aims is plainly an attempt to disarm hostile critics—as it partly disarmed Wilson.
    The influence of Anglo-Saxon and mediaeval poetry on Tolkien is quite clear. To begin with, there is his strong tendency to a backward-looking nostalgia, derived in part from Chesterton and Belloc, and their 'two acres and a cow' Distributism. (One should remember that one of Chesterton's best books is on Chaucer.) Next there is the pleasure in the sensual quality of life in the Middle Ages, as portrayed in its poems—great sides of beef cooking over open fires, magnificent feasts, colourful festivities, and so on. (Mervyn Peake is also fascinated by this world in his Titus Groan trilogy.) Finally, there is the element of savagery and wildness: the great battles, the burning of Njal, the bleak open moorlands and the lakes that hold monsters like Grendel (perhaps the creepiest monster in literature outside Frankenstein). It is very much an idealised, Chestertonian mediaevalism, rather like that of T. H. White. From The Lord of the Rings , one would gather that Tolkien's interest in the Middle Ages is literary and idealistic, not precise and detailed, like that of G. G. Coulton and Huizinga. And it could be argued that the battle scenes of The Lord of the Rings spoil the total effect, that they seem to be part of a completely different book. They certainly interrupt the swift flow of the story. When I first read The Lord of the Rings I skipped the whole of the fifth book in order to find out what happens after Frodo is captured by the Orcs, and when I later read it aloud to my children, they again insisted on skipping it. On this occasion, I returned to the fifth book after I had got Frodo and Sam on their road to Mount