Happy Birthday J.R.R. Tolkien. Oh, and Clement Attlee.

Nobody seems to have remembered Tolkien’s eleventy-first birthday back in 2003, which is a great shame.  I suppose it was before the age of social media – but still.  Think of the party.

As it happens, having concluded my Proust year, I decided to bring in 2020 in the laziest fashion possible – by re-reading Lord of the Rings for what feels like the eleventy-first time.

It is possible and perhaps necessary to read some very troubling politics into Tolkien.  Then again, it is necessary and desirable to recall just how often he rejected all forms of allegory.  The notion (repeatedly suggested) that The Lord of the Rings is some sort of allegory involving Fascism, Communism and “The West” would vex him immensely.  Tolkien, in his revealing introduction, points out that the First, not the Second world war was far more formative as far as his imagination was concerned.

The desolation before Mordor is a desolation of trenches.  Mordor’s brutal thorns that tear everything except mithril are barbed wire.  Above all – Frodo is the junior officer and Sam is the Tommy.  Perhaps the whole book is primarily about the sacrificial love of Sam for Frodo.  Certainly there is no more decisive power in Middle Earth than this love.

To evoke World War One is not to turn the book into an allegory of it.  The truth is, Tolkien could not easily be mapped onto any twentieth century political chart.  Of course, he was “reactionary” but he was reacting against the Norman Conquest more often than against Clement Attlee (whose birthday it also is).  Indeed, he is supposed to have actually flinched whenever people mentioned the Norman Conquest and may have muttered “too soon, too soon” under his breath.

(Clement Attlee and J.R.R. Tolkien shared a birthday and had similar WWI experiences but apart from that had absolutely nothing else on earth in common.)

As for Tolkien’s literary background… well it’s important to recall that he regarded Shakespeare as a dangerous modernist and had severe reservations about Chaucer.  He was a philologist in a strangely literal sense in that he was a lover, a passionate lover of words.  He loved them epistemically – diachronically rather than synchronically – which is why he also loved trees so much.  Rhizomes would not have interested him very much.

It is odd to think that while he was in Oxford, the closest thing to his opposite number in Paris might have been Roland Barthes.  Some day, someone will write a play about Tolkien and Barthes in the afterlife – forced to share a padded cell together.

One thing I do like about Tolkien is the dull bits.  Much of Lord of the Rings involves tramping about in the wilderness, getting tired, hungry and cold.  The actual fighting to walking ratio is comparatively small – which equates to the far more realistic ratios of walking to fighting in the real military life.  But the dull bits are what make the exciting bits exciting.  There can be no excitement without dullness.  Sports highlights are dull because they offer end to end excitement thus robbing the audience of the excitement of wondering when something exciting is going to happen.

When Tolkien capitulated to some aspects of modernity in the 1960s and purchased a television set, he most enjoyed watching test cricket.

So let’s not use Tolkien to make twenty-first century political points.  Let’s read him for the pacing of the narrative and the love of language and the love of trees.  Let’s read him for Sam.  The book becomes more Samcentric every time we read it.

Tolkien could not have lived in the twenty-first century.  The smoking ban in pubs would have pained him beyond measure.