The Road to Middle-Earth: How J. R. R. Tolkien Created a New Mythology eBook : Shippey, Tom

Dan Lawler
4.0 out of 5 starsVerified Purchase
Was the Way to Middle Earth Shut?
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 8, 2022
Author Tom Shippey demonstrates how the Lord of the Rings/Silmarillion legendarium grew from Tolkien’s deep dive into the search for original meaning associated with Old English words, fragments and stories touching on the subject of Faerie. As a fellow philologist, Shippey is uniquely qualified for the task; he has held the same chair in language at Oxford that Tolkien once had, and the two are certainly rare birds of a feather. Shippey examines Tolkien’s personal motivations in storytelling and the value he placed on fairy tales, including LOTR.

What is fascinating, and worthy of a book itself, is Shippey’s theory in chapters 8 and 9 that, as Tolkien aged, he became increasingly despondent over whether his stories bore the “inner consistency of reality” which, by Tolkien’s reckoning, was the singular quality that justified the immense time and effort he had devoted to writing fantasies at the expense of his professional career.

Tolkien’s metaphysics of storytelling are set out in the essay On Fairy Stories (1939) and the follow-up tale Leaf by Niggle (1943) which illustrated the principles in story form. The two papers presented as optimistic a view of storytelling in particular, and art in general, as any author or artist could ever hope for. Literature and art had the capacity to convey other-worldly truth because man, though fallen in nature, still possessed a capacity to discern and communicate at least some splintered fragments of that truth. Because God is Creator, humans made in His image are sub-creators whose works, if properly done, can possess eternal value. Indeed, the author/artist may hope to find a representation of their earthly work that was only seen in part and partially enjoyed here but in the world to come seen in full and fully enjoyed throughout eternity.

Shippey says of Tolkien that “by the 1960s he was not so sure” of his theory of sub-creation. (Location 5247.) That is no loss to Shippey as he believes Tolkien's works “keep their own purely literary justification; the theory of ‘sub-creation’ is not needed.” Id. But it was otherwise for Tolkien himself as the ideas underlying sub-creation were the only basis by which fantasy was worthwhile and meaningful, and distinguished from mere escapism. Two of those ideas were the inner consistency of reality and eucatastrophe.

In On Fairy Stories, Tolkien created the term eucatastrophe to describe the universally desired joy of the happy ending “or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous ‘turn’ … which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well…. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and insofar as evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.” It is this peculiar quality of joy that infuses good fantasy with the inner consistency of reality, providing “a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth.”

For Tolkien, without this hope, joy and truth, there was no escape from the nihilism of universal final defeat. Yet Shippey finds it absent in Tolkien’s later writings: “For Tolkien there was no eucatastrophe” and “the sense of age and exclusion seems to have grown on him more and more strongly.” Loc. 5553. Tolkien came to doubt his theory of sub-creation and “the legitimacy of his own mental wanderings.” Loc. 5239. According to Shippey, Tolkien “asked more than he had a right to” and all hopes for a supernatural guarantee “are bound to be disappointed.” Loc. 5247.

Shippey’s conclusions are certainly shaped in part by his own skepticism. Tolkien scholar Joseph Pearce, who is acquainted with Shippey, said he is not a Christian and “conceded readily that he did not fully understand the religious and theological aspects of [Tolkien’s] work but most certainly did not dismiss it or deride it.” Still, it is true, as Shippey elaborates, that Tolkien’s later poems and short stories lack the joyful turn of the eucatastrophe, and end with the protagonists being denied access to the Perilous Realm of Faerie, returning with melancholy to the ordinariness of their everyday lives. Shippey concludes from this that Tolkien “no longer imagined himself rejoining his own creations after death, like Niggle” and “he felt they were lost….” Loc. 5247.

Shippey does not address the cause of Tolkien’s apparent disillusionment. Perhaps, given his own predispositions, Shippey simply attributed it to the man growing older and wiser. But without the theory of sub-creation, or an equivalent, there really is nothing beyond the circles of this world except a universal final defeat that awaits all. Tolkien could not have fallen that far, but there must have been something underlying the ominous change in tone of his later works. Its worth pursuing.

The book presents much to think about. Also, the word-craft on the philological side is superb and provides many surprises and delights. In addition, Shippey’s droll and deadly rebuttals to Tolkien’s snobbish literary critics are especially satisfying. Definitely a good read.