Читать книгу Defending Middle-earth: Tolkien: Myth and Modernity - Patrick Curry - Страница 16

One of the first critics to attack Tolkien was Catherine Stimpson, in 1969. ‘An incorrigible nationalist,’ she wrote, Tolkien ‘celebrates the English bourgeois pastoral idyll. Its characters, tranquil and well fed, live best in placid, philistine, provincial rural cosiness.’

Now it is true that the hobbits (excepting Bilbo and Frodo, and perhaps Sam … and Merry and Pippin) would indeed have preferred to live quiet rural lives, if they could have. Unfortunately for them, and Stimpson’s point, there is much more to Middle-earth than the Shire. By the same token, any degree of English nationalism that the hobbits represent is highly qualified. Tolkien himself pointed out that ‘hobbits are not a Utopian vision, or recommended as an ideal in their own or any age. They, as all peoples and their situations, are an historical accident – as the Elves point out to Frodo – and an impermanent one in the long view.’ It is also possible, as Jonathan Bate suggests, to draw a distinction between love of the local land, on the one hand, and patriotic love of the fatherland on the other. In The Lord of the Rings, the lovingly detailed specificities of the natural world – which include but far outrun those of the Shire – far exceed any kind of abstract nationalism.

Stimpson also accuses Tolkien of ‘class snobbery’ – that is, the lord of the manor’s disdain for commoners, and, by extension, the working class. Well, in The Hobbit, perhaps; but only zealous detectors of orcism and trollism would ignore its other virtues, such as any quality as a story. And its hero, if no peasant, is plainly no lord. But with The Lord of the Rings – if this charge means anything worse than a sort of chivalrous paternalism, appropriate to someone growing up at the turn of this century, which now looks dated – then it fails.

There is certainly class awareness. But the idioms of Tolkien’s various hobbits only correspond to their social classes in the same way as do those of contemporary humans. The accent and idiom of Sam (arguably the real hero of the book) and most other hobbits are those of a rural peasantry, while those of Frodo, Bilbo and their close friends range through the middle classes. Or take Orcs; their distinguishing characteristics are a love of machines and loud noises (especially explosions), waste, vandalism and destruction for its own sake; also, they alone torture and kill for fun. Their language, accordingly, is ‘at all times full of hate and anger,’ and composed of ‘brutal jargons, scarcely sufficient even for their own needs, unless it were for curses and abuse.’ In the Third Age, ‘Orcs and Trolls spoke as they would, without love of words or things; and their language was actually more degraded and filthy,’ writes Tolkien, ‘than I have shown it.’ As he adds, too truly, ‘Much the same sort of talk can still be heard among the orc-minded; dreary and repetitive with hatred and contempt …’

But Orc speech is not all the same; there are at least three kinds, and none is necessarily ‘working-class.’ And it can be found today among members of any social class; nor is money a bar. In fact, virtually all of Tolkien’s major villains – Smaug, Saruman, the Lord of the Nazgûl, and presumably Sauron too – speak in unmistakably posh tones. After all, the orc-minded are mere servants of Mordor; its contemporary masters (or rather, master-servants) much more resemble the Nazgûl, although today they probably wear expensive suits and ride private jets rather than quasi-pterodactyls. And although many fewer than Orcs (who knows? perhaps there are exactly nine), they are infinitely more powerful, and to be feared.

There is also the obvious and fundamental fact of The Lord of the Rings as a tale of ‘the hour of the Shire-folk, when they arise from their quiet fields to shake the towers and counsels of the Great.’ Nonetheless, the charge of pandering to social hierarchy has proved durable. Another unpleasant and related accusation sometimes made is racism. Now it is true that Tolkien’s evil creatures are frequently ‘swart, slant-eyed,’ and tend to come from the south (‘the cruel Haradrim’) and east (‘the wild Easterlings’) – both threatening directions in Tolkien’s ‘moral cartography.’ It is also true that black – as in Breath, Riders, Hand, Years, Land, Speech – is often a terrible colour, especially when contrasted with Gandalf the White, the White Rider, and so on. But the primary association of black here is with night and darkness, not race. And there are counter-examples: Saruman’s sign is a white hand; Aragorn’s standard is mostly black; the Black Riders were not actually black, except their outer robes; and the Black Stone of Erech is connected with Aragorn’s forebear, Isildur.

Overall, Tolkien is drawing on centuries of such moral valuation, not unrelated to historical experience attached to his chosen setting in order to convey something immediately recognizable in the context of his story. As Kathleen Herbert noticed, Orcs sound very like the first horrified reports in Europe of the invading Huns in the fourth and fifth centuries: ‘broad-shouldered, bow-legged, devilishly effective fighters, moving fast, talking a language that sounds like no human speech (probably Turkic) and practising ghastly tortures with great relish.’ (Théoden may well have been modelled on Theodoric I, the aged Visigothic king who died leading his warriors in a charge against Attila’s Huns in the Battle of Chalons.)

Perhaps the worst you could say is that Tolkien doesn’t actually go out of his way to forestall the possibility of a racist interpretation. (I say ‘possibility’ because it is ridiculous to assume that readers automatically transfer their feelings about Orcs to all the swart or slant-eyed people they encounter in the street.) But as Virginia Luling has pointed out, the appearance of racism is deceptive, ‘not only because Tolkien in his non-fictional writing several times repudiated racist ideas, but because … in his sub-creation the whole intellectual underpinning of racism is absent.’ In any case, such an interpretation, as the story in The Lord of the Rings proceeds, would get increasingly harder to maintain – and this relates to another common criticism, also voiced by Stimpson, that Tolkien’s characters divide neatly into ‘good and evil, nice and nasty.’ But as anyone who has really read it could tell you, the initial semi-tribal apportioning of moral probity increasingly breaks down, as evil emerges ‘among the kingly Gondorians, the blond Riders of Rohan, the seemingly incorruptible wizards, and even the thoroughly English hobbit-folk of the Shire.’ (Incidentally, hobbits appear to be brown-skinned, not white.) By the same token, Frodo, Gollum, Boromir and Denethor all experience intense inner struggles over what the right thing to do is, with widely varying outcomes; and as Le Guin has noted, several major characters have a ‘shadow.’ In Frodo’s case, there are arguably two: Sam and Gollum, who is himself doubled as Gollum/Stinker and Sméagol/Slinker, as Sam calls him.

‘If you want to write a tale of this sort,’ Tolkien once wrote, ‘you must consult your roots, and a man of the North-west of the Old World will set his heart and the action of his tale in an imaginary world of that air, and that situation: with the Shoreless Sea of his innumerable ancestors to the West, and the endless lands (out of which enemies mostly come) to the East.’

Thus, as Clyde Kilby recounts, when Tolkien was asked what lay east and south of Middle-earth, he replied: ‘“Rhûn is the Elvish word for east. Asia, China, Japan, and all the things which people in the West regard as far away. And south of Harad is Africa, the hot countries.” Then Mr. Resnick asked, “That makes Middle-earth Europe, doesn’t it?” To which Tolkien replied, “Yes, of course – Northwestern Europe … where my imagination comes from”.’ (In which case, as Tolkien also agreed, Mordor ‘would be roughly in the Balkans.’)

He reacted sharply to reading a description of Middle-earth as ‘Nordic,’ however: ‘Not Nordic, please! A word I personally dislike; it is associated, though of French origin, with racialist theories …’ He also contested Auden’s assertion that for him ‘the North is a sacred direction’: ‘That is not true. The North-west of Europe, where I (and most of my ancestors) have lived, has my affection, as a man’s home should. I love its atmosphere, and know more of its histories and languages than I do of other parts; but it is not “sacred,” nor does it exhaust my affections.’

It is also striking that the races in Middle-earth are most striking in their variety and autonomy. I suppose that this could be seen as an unhealthy emphasis on ‘race’; it seems to me rather an assertion of the wonder of multicultural difference. And given that most of Middle-earth’s peoples are closely tied to a particular geography and ecology, and manage to live there without exploiting it to the point of destruction, isn’t this what is nowadays called bioregionalism? But no kind of apartheid is involved: one of the subplots of The Lord of the Rings concerns an enduring friendship between members of races traditionally estranged (Gimli and Legolas), and the most important union in the book, between Aragorn and Arwen, is an ‘interracial’ marriage. As usual, the picture is a great deal more complex than the critics, although not necessarily the public, seem to see.