Tolkien's Responses to Critics
(avg. read time: 12–23 mins.)
We conclude our two-parter on Tolkien and criticism by looking at Tolkien’s responses to specific critics. Here I look at responses to either positive or negative evaluative comments and responses to points of more general literary criticism. Some of the negative comments will be criticisms still registered today. But I will say upfront for anyone wondering: no, there is no letter in the published collection in which Tolkien addresses the point regularly raised about the Eagles.
The first such letter Tolkien wrote responding to critique actually concerned The Hobbit all the way back in 1937 (Letter #17 [15 October 1937 to Stanley Unwin]). The occasion for the letter is responding to Richard Hughes’s evaluation of the book passed on to Tolkien by Stanley Unwin. Hughes had said that The Hobbit was “one of the best stories for children I have come across for a very long time.” But he had also said, “The only snag I can see is that many parents … may be afraid that certain parts of it would be too terrifying for bedside reading.” Of course, part of the problem with this complaint is that Tolkien’s stories have not been set in a so-called “child-friendly” world, of which Tolkien says, “I am afraid that snag appears in everything; though actually the presence (even if only on the borders) of the terrible is, I believe, what gives this imagined world its verisimilitude. A safe fairy-land is untrue to all worlds.” I have already noted in my work on Tolkien’s theology of sub-creation that verisimilitude in fantasy was crucial for him, and so I will not say more about this comment here.
(This letter is also notable for mentioning two anonymous reviews of The Hobbit, which Tolkien knew were from C. S. Lewis. Tolkien was unsurprised by Lewis’s enthusiasm for the book, but he also said, “I must respect his opinion, as I believed him to be the best living critic until he turned his attention to me, and no degree of friendship would make him say what he does not mean: he is the most uncompromisingly honest man I have met!”)
Later in Letter #19, also to Stanley Unwin (16 December 1937), Tolkien responds to comments from reader Edward Crankshaw about the Quenta Silmarillion and “The Gest of Beren and Lúthien” (preserved today in Beren and Lúthien). Few, beyond Lewis and the other Inklings, as well as Tolkien’s family, had known of these stories that Tolkien had been working on since the First World War. As I noted in my review of Tolkien, he felt a particular sense of personal attachment to these stories (in part because of the circumstances surrounding when he started writing them), for which reason he said, “I have suffered a sense of fear and bereavement, quite ridiculous, since I let this private and beloved nonsense out; and I think if it had seemed to you to be nonsense I should have felt really crushed.” But he was quite happy to learn that Crankshaw did not scorn the Silmarillion. He agreed with him that the verse form of the Beren and Lúthien story needed improvement, since it was only a rough draft for him. He also addresses an issue that Crankshaw had with the names, which is a problem some have with reading The Silmarillion today, by once again appealing to the crucial factor of verisimilitude: “I am sorry the names split his eyes – personally I believe (and here believe I am a good judge) they are good, and a large part of the effect. They are coherent and consistent and made upon two related linguistic formulae, so that they achieve a reality not fully achieved to my feeling by other name-inventors (say Swift or Dunsany!).”
Interestingly, when Tolkien was working on The Lord of the Rings, he found that Rayner Unwin—who had previously read The Hobbit—was now registering the criticism that Hughes had against The Hobbit, particularly since one going from The Hobbit to Book I of The Lord of the Rings will be struck by a tonal shift, even though Book I does represent a transition between the two. Tolkien’s defense in Letter #109 (31 July 1947 to Sir Stanley Unwin) is once again to stress the importance of verisimilitude, rather than to keep the more jovial tone of The Hobbit.
But he also encounters in this review from Rayner the suspicion that Tolkien’s story is allegorical, which Tolkien will deal with again and again for years to come. He insists that the struggle of darkness and light that is part of his story “is for me just a particular phase of history, one example of its pattern, perhaps, but not The Pattern; and the actors are individuals – they each, of course, contain universals, or they would not live at all, but they never represent them as such.” This is one of the basic senses in which Tolkien rejected allegory as an interpretation of his work. His characters, events, and features of his world are not simple stand-ins for some “universal” thing (as is often the case in ancient allegorical interpretation).
A second sense in which he rejects it is the more general one of things in his story purposefully standing for something else outside the story. The One Ring is one of the frequent resources for allegorical interpretation, and on this point Tolkien says,
You can make the Ring into an allegory of our own time, if you like: an allegory of the inevitable fate that waits for all attempts to defeat evil power by power. But that is only because all power magical or mechanical does always so work. You cannot write a story about an apparently simple magic ring without that bursting in, if you really take the rings seriously, and make things happen that would happen, if such a thing existed.
Thus, yet again, Tolkien is insistent that internal consistency, coherence, and verisimilitude guide his stories, not the interest of direct correspondence to what is external to the story and the world in which it happens.
By the time The Lord of the Rings was published—after a back-and-forth with Allen & Unwin about Tolkien’s desire to publish The Silmarillion alongside it—we see Tolkien writing a letter, this time directly to Rayner Unwin in Letter #149 (9 September 1954) responding to the reviews of The Fellowship of the Ring. He was actually pleasantly surprised with the reviews for the most part, but he comments that some of the reviews seem to be driven by animosity from his association with Lewis, as they “seem to have preferred lampooning his remarks or his review to reading the book,” and “several critics have obviously not got far beyond Chapter I.” And so he continues while naming names of unsavory critics, such as Peter Green and Edwin Muir (who we will see again), but he offers no direct response to either. What he does respond to is the general criticism of style. He simply finds himself puzzled by the wide discrepancy in judgments on it. This was the case despite style being something subject to standards other than taste.
More interesting is his response to reviewers of Fellowship in Letter #154 to Naomi Mitchison (25 September 1954). He tells her that some reviewers have described the book as “simple-minded, just a plain fight between Good and Evil, with all the good just good, and the bad just bad. Pardonable, perhaps (though at least Boromir has been overlooked) in people in a hurry, and with only a fragment to read, and, of course, without the earlier written but unpublished Elvish stories.” Unfortunately, even with the release of the other two volumes, along with The Silmarillion after his death, this evaluation still shows up. When someone says such a thing, I take it as one of the clearest possible indications that they either have not read the book or they did not pay much attention to it if they looked at the pages. In fact, it’s right up there with people who say Frodo destroyed the Ring or that they knew from beginning that Frodo would destroy the Ring, when he did no such thing.
Of course, this was another one of those cases where Tolkien felt vindicated in his belief that The Silmarillion needed to be published alongside The Lord of the Rings to give it context. Anyone who mistakenly comes away from The Lord of the Rings with too high of a view of Elves and their goodness will be quickly brought down to earth after reading the stories of Elves in The Silmarillion. But beyond that, Tolkien notes that both the Elves and the Men of Gondor were subject to complex failures that result from a peculiar admixture of good and evil in that both sought to be embalmers who slowed change and history or otherwise longed for the past with overweening nostalgia rather than working for the betterment of the present.
More directly to the point, Tolkien cites an incomplete list of factors that work against this criticism, because, “this is a tale about a war, and if war is allowed (at least as a topic and a setting) it is not much good complaining that all the people on one side are against those on the other. Not that I have made even this issue quite so simple: there are Saruman, and Denethor, and Boromir; and there are treacheries and strife even among the Orcs.” This is not even to mention Sméagol/Gollum, who embodies internal conflict most vividly, and even as he achieves the goals of his evil desires he becomes an instrument of ultimate good. And, of course, the Ring is capable of tempting anyone (save Tom Bombadil), including by turning a person like Gandalf’s will to do good against them. The Ring’s temptation would not be worth noting if all the “good” people were just good and all the “bad” people were just bad. Indeed, on this latter point, there are despicable characters throughout The Lord of the Rings, but none are presented as inherently evil, as Tolkien does not think such a thing can exist. Much the same point is covered in Letter #183 (notes on W. H. Auden’s review of The Return of the King), although there it is directed to a sympathetic reviewer, and it is here where Tolkien explicitly says that he does not believe there is such a thing as “Absolute Evil.” And since I have otherwise discussed that letter extensively in my last entry on Tolkien’s theology of sub-creation, I will not say more about it here.
In Letter #156 (4 November 1954 draft to Robert Murray, S.J.), Tolkien responds to a rather prominent criticism of The Two Towers, one which has been echoed by critics as famous as George R. R. Martin. That is, Gandalf’s return after death seems like a cop-out or “cheating.” He acknowledges that, like any large-scale work of art (such as Homer, Beowulf, the Aeneid, and so on), there are defects in his work and one of these is the presentation of Gandalf’s return. But he insists that this defect is due to the demands of narrative technique, not to inherently bad writing or world-building:
He must return at that point, and such explanations of his survival as are explicitly set out must be given there – but the narrative is urgent, and must not be held up for elaborate discussions involving the whole ‘mythological’ setting. It is a little impeded even so, though I have severely cut G’s account of himself. I might perhaps have made more clear the later remarks in Vol. II (and Vol. III) which refer to or are made by Gandalf, but I have purposely kept all allusions to the higher matters down to mere hints, perceptible only by the most attentive, or kept them under unexplained symbolic forms. So God and the ‘angelic’ gods, the Lords or Powers of the West, only peep through in such places as Gandalf’s conversation with Frodo: ‘behind that there was something else at work, beyond any design of the Ring-maker’s’; or in Faramir’s Númenórean grace at dinner.
Gandalf really ‘died’, and was changed: for that seems to me the only real cheating, to represent anything that can be called ‘death’ as making no difference. ‘I am G. the White, who has returned from death’.
This is yet another case in which Tolkien would insist that The Silmarillion needed to have been published as a companion volume to explain such ambiguities. It was not the requirement of the plot or the failure of nerve on the part of the author that brought Gandalf back. It was the internal dynamics of the Secondary World, involving the Valar who sent Gandalf to Middle-earth in the first place, that demanded it. And besides, as Tolkien notes, Gandalf has still been returned to the limitations of incarnation, “Gandalf may be enhanced in power (that is, under the forms of this fable, in sanctity), but if still embodied he must still suffer care and anxiety, and the needs of flesh. He has no more (if no less) certitudes, or freedoms, than say a living theologian.”
Tolkien’s first of several preserved letters to W. H. Auden in Letter #163 (7 June 1955) features Tolkien once again responding to interpretations of allegory in his work. Tolkien sounds some familiar notes,
In a larger sense, it is I suppose impossible to write any ‘story’ that is not allegorical in proportion as it ‘comes to life’; since each of us is an allegory, embodying in a particular tale and clothed in the garments of time and place, universal truth and everlasting life. Anyway most people that have enjoyed The Lord of the Rings have been affected primarily by it as an exciting story; and that is how it was written.
Again, Tolkien speaks of allegory in terms of embodying universals and on such grounds rejects the notion that his work functions as an allegory in any way but the most basic of senses that every story has an element of “allegory” to it. But it is as a story with particular characters involved in particular plotlines driven by particular events that readers have become immersed in it, not as an allegory with pronounced resonances. Since I have commented on this letter extensively in one of my entries in the theology of sub-creation series, I will not say more about it here. The same applies to Letter #165 to Houghton Mifflin Co. (July 1955), which I have also discussed extensively, and which makes a similar point in response to the question of allegory.
The next letter of relevance is part of his correspondence with fan Hugh Brogan, who I mentioned in the previous Tolkien Tuesday post, in Letter #171 (September 1955). As noted previously, Brogan was hesitant about being impertinent in his criticisms towards a work and an author he regarded quite highly. In this case, he mentions to Tolkien that he found parts of The Two Towers archaic in narrative style, particularly the chapter “The King of the Golden Hall,” and that he agreed with a critic who called it “tushery” (a phony medieval style that attempts to make language appear period-appropriate through ignorant and inelegant usage of old terminology, like the expletive tush). Tolkien first assures him that he perceived no impertinence in Brogan’s criticism, in fact he said, “anyone so appreciative and so perceptive is entitled to criticism.” But in any case, he registers his disagreement with Brogan and the critic that his style constitutes tushery. The moderately archaic style is actually crucial for the verisimilitude because, on the one hand, the character needs to be understood by the audience and, on the other hand, the character needs speech and thought that reflect each other. As he says,
people who think like that just do not talk a modern idiom…. For a King who spoke in a modern style would not really think in such terms at all, and any reference to sleeping quietly in the grave would be a deliberate archaism of expression on his part (however worded) far more bogus than the actual ‘archaic’ English that I have used. Like some non-Christian making a reference to some Christian belief which did not in fact move him at all.
The last sentence connects with a criticism Tolkien had of the Arthurian legends, expressed as they were in terms too explicitly derivative of the Christian religion, which did not fit the context of such fairy-story (see Letter #131).
Tolkien’s next response to criticism concerns remarks made by Edwin Muir in a review of The Return of the King, in which the latter had said, “All the characters are boys masquerading as adult heroes … and will never come to puberty…. Hardly one of them knows anything about women.” Tolkien responds to these comments through Letter #177 to Rayner Unwin (8 December 1955), saying, “Blast Edwin Muir and his delayed adolescence. He is old enough to know better. It might do to hear what women think of his ‘knowing about women’, especially as a test of being mentally adult.” As we have seen to this point, Tolkien does not tend to respond to criticism in such a dismissive fashion, unless it is obvious to him that it is made in bad faith. It is an odd critic indeed who makes a point about knowing the sex lives of the characters he reads about and then complains when he is told nothing about the subject, even getting belligerent to the point of suggesting that one is not an adult until one has had sex and is sure to let others know about it. If the upcoming Tolkien show on Amazon lives down to its reputation on this front, it will be because of people with the same kind of arrested development as Muir. (I will be reviewing the first season of the show in any case.)
We will consider the next two relevant letters together because both Letter #191 (draft: 26 July 1956 to Miss J. Burn) and Letter #192 (27 July 1956 to Amy Ronald) address criticisms about Frodo that persist today in some quarters of LOTR fans. Both readers had registered problems with Frodo’s failure to destroy the Ring and yet that he is treated as a hero nonetheless. Tolkien once again appeals to verisimilitude and the internal consistency of the reality of his Secondary World. Given what has been established about the power of the Ring, and especially its growing influence due to either length of exposure or proximity to its point of origin, Frodo being unable to destroy the Ring of his own will was inevitable. Indeed, the decisive moment is one at which the Ring was exerting its “maximum power” (functioning as something of a failsafe if anyone should try the unthinkable) and Frodo had had trouble casting it away even in Bag End. But despite knowing his own weakness, despite all that he had been told by Gandalf at Bag End, despite all that he had heard at the Council of Elrond, despite being made aware of the dangers of any such quest to Mordor (particularly for the Ringbearer), Frodo accepted the burden voluntarily. He had done all that he could have been expected to do and more, resisting the temptation of the Ring with all his willpower, but his willpower was not infinite. In Tolkien’s reflection on the last petition of the Lord’s Prayer, he notes that, “there exists the possibility of being placed in positions beyond one’s power.” Such is what happened to Frodo, as he was constitutionally incapable of resisting this power in the Sammath Naur, but that he made it this far is admirable in itself, “Few others, possibly no others of his time, would have got so far.” And he only made it this far for the other major reason that he is deserving of honor: his mercy/pity towards Gollum.
If Frodo had taken Gollum’s life, the Quest would have well and truly failed. But at the point of catastrophe, Tolkien writes, “The Other Power then took over: the Writer of the Story (by which I do not mean myself), ‘that one ever-present Person who is never absent and never named’ (as one critic has said).” Just as this One (Eru Ilúvatar) had brought Frodo and Gollum together by Bilbo’s pity, so by Frodo’s pity, his act of mercy towards Gollum, he brought the Quest to its proper conclusion. Bilbo’s act of pity was taken up by providence to make it possible for Frodo to enter Mordor, and Frodo’s act of pity was taken up by providence to ensure not only that Frodo would make it to Mount Doom, but that the Ring would be destroyed despite Frodo’s inevitable failure of will. The importance of this point is such that Gandalf’s statement that Gollum may yet have some part to play in the fate of the Ring is repeated (in some form or another) in all three volumes (or Books I, IV, and VI). These two readers were not malicious in their criticism, but unfortunately Tolkien mentions a third who was in saying that Frodo “should have been hung and not honoured,” to which Tolkien says, “It seems sad and strange that, in this evil time when daily people of good will are tortured, ‘brainwashed’, and broken, anyone could be so fiercely simpleminded and selfrighteous.” Indeed, even as it is essential to take seriously the implications of the last petition of the Lord’s Prayer, it is also essential to take seriously the implications of the preceding one: “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.”
Tolkien also wrote Letter #244 as a draft to an anonymous reader (circa 1963) addressing criticisms of Faramir and Éowyn. The whole letter is taken up with discussing both characters, but the specific criticisms are not clearly referenced before the last paragraph. Since it would be overly speculative to try to reconstruct the criticisms from what Tolkien says prior to the last paragraph, especially because the best that could be done is to presume—against Tolkien’s tendencies elsewhere—that everything he says is directed at a specific point the reader made. Thus, I only address the last paragraph, where Tolkien mentions that the reader was critical of the speed of the relationship or “love” of these two characters. Yet again, he insists that this is not unrealistic, even based on experience in the Primary World:
In my experience feelings and decisions ripen very quickly (as measured by mere ‘clock-time’, which is actually not justly applicable) in periods of great stress, and especially under the expectation of imminent death. And I do not think that persons of high estate and breeding need all the petty fencing and approaches in matters of ‘love’. This tale does not deal with a period of ‘Courtly Love’ and its pretences; but with a culture more primitive (sc. less corrupt) and nobler.
This has been a rather common criticism of love in fairy-stories and the like in the modern era. Portrayals in such a medium are often derided as unrealistic or giving people a distorted and potentially unhealthy perception of how romantic love works. But this criticism stumbles on the fact that there is no one way it works, and surely no one speed at which it works. For many of our ancestors, and still in many cultures today, it came after years of committing to more foundational relationship dynamics focused on commitment, concord, harmony, and union. For others, there is an indelible impression made on the first encounter that serves as the root for everything else that follows (about which I would recommend Shadiversity’s “In defense of LOVE at first sight”). For others still, it can happen years after the two people have met and something indescribably transfigures the one in the sight of the other, so that they are seen in a new, more lovely light that creates a desire for romance. And so on the scenarios for the emergence of love can go. And the case of Faramir and Éowyn is by no means out of the realm of realistic possibility, especially in high-stress situations, where one might seek comfort in the company of another or two people are forced together and find that they react to each other in unanticipated ways or see each other in ways they never expected. Finally, as Tolkien notes, one should also account for cultural differences in how such matters work, as this is not a Jane Austen novel, or a book trying to mimic contemporary romance.
The last letter of concern for this review is Letter #246, a collection of drafts addressed to Mrs. Eileen Elgar (September 1963). This is the same woman who received the letter commented on in the entry on Tolkien’s dislike of Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia (particularly The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe). Here, she has made some comments on Frodo’s failure to destroy the Ring, along with some other points related to this aspect of the story, including the character of Samwise Gamgee. However, since it is unclear what criticisms were made in regard to these other aspects of the story, I will not offer undue speculation here.
To the fundamental point about Frodo’s failure, Tolkien makes much the same points as he has in previous letters on the subject. He clarifies here that Frodo’s failure was not a moral one, which he says, “can only be asserted, I think, when a man’s effort or endurance falls short of his limits, and the blame decreases as that limit is closer approached.” In fact, this letter presents most succinctly the situation Frodo faces:
At the last moment the pressure of the Ring would reach its maximum – impossible, I should have said, for any one to resist, certainly after long possession, months of increasing torment, and when starved and exhausted. Frodo had done what he could and spent himself completely (as an instrument of Providence) and had produced a situation in which the object of his quest could be achieved. His humility (with which he began) and his sufferings were justly rewarded by the highest honour; and his exercise of patience and mercy towards Gollum gained him Mercy: his failure was redressed.
Likewise, to paraphrase a comment he will make later, Frodo is no more blameworthy for the breaking of his will by the overwhelming power of the Ring than he would have been for his body being broken by another overwhelming force. Still, another factor that he notes is that, despite the misled character of the criticism, Frodo actually agrees with that perception. His trauma is characterized by, “not only nightmare memories of past horrors that afflicted him, but also unreasoning self-reproach: he saw himself and all that he done [sic.] as a broken failure.” All the sacrifices that he had made, all that he had endured, and all the weight he bore with every decision had taken their toll on him and he could not go back to how he was before; he could not return to his simple Hobbit life in the Shire. The fact that the finger on which he wore the Ring had been bitten off was an ever-present reminder of those final moments in the Quest. He could not avoid feeling disconnected from this old familiar place he had returned to. He could not find healing or even “a truer understanding of his position in littleness and in greatness,” except by taking the ship to the Undying Lands, a spot on which was given to him by another act of sacrifice from Arwen. Thus, as with Tolkien’s other responses to critics, we see how crucial the notions of internal logic/consistency and verisimilitude are to his approach to his fiction and in his defense of the same.