Joel’s Improved Personal Website
Whiff of Middle Earth
I thought I would finally take some time to write down why, exactly, I am uncomfortable with anything Tolkien-related. This of course affects me most commonly when someone brings up the Lord of the Rings movies. I haven’t seen them yet and can’t pretend for very long that I have, but if I volunteer any of that information I am met with a mixture of skepticism and pity.
I don’t object to the movies because of any reservations about gratuitous magic and sorcery – in fact I didn’t feel that the stories made gratuitous use of either. The problem is of another kind, altogether, and a lot more complex.
I read all of Tolkien’s books as a young teen, twelve or thirteen years ago, before they were anything like as popular as they are now. The only movie versions that existed were the chintzy animated ones that had been done in the 70s, and I remember only snatches of those. But the books I read over and over again many times. I was constantly thinking about them – I would have died before telling any of my peers about it, but I was. I didn’t stop after The Hobbit or the trilogy either. I sloughed through Silmarillion and then through biographies and the meandering “lost tales” put together from Tolkien’s handwritten notes by his son Christopher after he died. Being fond of languages and codes, I learned how to write in runes, then in “elvish,” the languages as well as the lettering.
I believe Tolkien was a genius: not just a literary genius who could entertain, but a real genius in the intellectual and artistic sense of the word. He was primarily, it is well known, a philologist, a lover of language. Everything he wrote sprang out of his study of language, then his creation of his own artificial languages, then the stories of the civilisations those etymologies reflected. He knew that the study of language is the study of the human story, and grew his fictional world around the many-fingered vine of language, just as our world grew the same way; and I believe this is why his stories have such resonance with the people who take time to read them. Among his early fans were, of course, many writers, who tried to emulate the Tolkien experience and created what we call “fantasy fiction,” and their stories are just that, random fantasies. Tolkien was not a terribly great writer (just look at all the wooden dialogue in the Rings trilogy), but his fascination with language more than saved his writings – it put you in a world that was – yes, contrived – but contrived in ways that rang true, and made you feel as if Middle Earth and our Earth shared some touchstone of reality. So much for Tolkien’s genius, then.
There are, for me, two kinds of fiction. There is the kind that puts you in touch with Reality in a way you never saw before; and there is the kind that draws you into its own world and colours your thinking about the real one. For me, Tolkien’s fiction turned out to be the second kind. Sitting constantly in front of my mind’s fascinated eye, it was a long time before I recognized how much less fulfilling it had made the real one for me. It caused me to long for heroism and opportunity; but what is heroic opportunity in Middle Earth? Buckle down, fight the bad guys, get wounded, get from point A to point B, keep a weather eye out for prophecies and enchanted swords…
I have a friend who was in a methamphetamine addiction and in and out of fourteen treatments, when finally he cried out to God and was delivered. He has been free now for three years and runs his own roofing business.
Now, was that transition a little jarring for you? It was for me, too. For a long time I could not even find it in myself to be interested in stories like this second one. They were uncomfortable. They were mundane, ordinary. They didn’t mesh well with the fancy pictures I kept in my head, so they presented me with no interest.
At some point I saw that I was living on candy. It tasted great and took away my appetite but it was all I ever ate, and it wasn’t healthy. The stories that are happening in the real world are crying out for your attention and participation, and the longer you sit in that trance the worse it will be when you finally wake up. The difference in satisfaction between confronting the hard, “ordinary” problems of the real world and the contrived heroics of the fictional one is the difference between apple pie and cotton candy.
This weakness in my imagination is not common to everyone (though it is probably more common than I once thought) – probably most people can watch those movies or read those books and still have no problem being empathetically engaged in the lives and issues of people around them. For me, when they are mentioned, it is like catching a whiff of a candy I once overdosed on, and a reminder of how sick I got from it.