Читать книгу J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century - Tom Shippey - Страница 18

One of the most undeniable (and admirable), if least imitated qualities of Tolkien’s eventual sequel, The Lord of the Rings, is the complex neatness of its overall design. It is divided into six ‘Books’ (the three volumes in which it usually appears were a publishing decision based on the cost of paper in post-war Britain). The first Book takes Bilbo’s successor Frodo, with his three hobbit companions and eventually Strider, or Aragorn, to Rivendell. There he is joined by Gandalf and the rest of the ‘fellowship’ of the ring, that is, Boromir, Legolas, and Gimli. Their journey south, during which they lose Gandalf, takes up the second Book. At that point the company of eight splits up. Boromir is killed. Frodo and Sam set off to reach Orodruin and destroy the Ring. Pippin and Merry are captured by the orcs. Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli pursue them. During the third, fourth, fifth and part of the sixth Book these three groups, still further supplemented (by the return of Gandalf) and subdivided (by the separation of Pippin and Merry), weave their paths in and out of each others’ knowledge, the latter often partial or mistaken. (See the diagram on p. 104.)

Symmetry is, however, more than discoverable, it is unmistakable, if you look for it. Thus, it could be an accident that both Books I and II, in The Fellowship of the Ring, contain a second chapter which is largely explanation of the past building up to decisions about the future – and ending with much the same decision, that Frodo has to take the Ring to the Cracks of Doom. It probably is an accident that both Books I and II contain much the same number of scene-shifts and scenes of threat – some three of the latter (Old Forest, Barrow-downs and Weathertop against Caradhras, Moria and the orcs in Lórien), and four or five of the former, with Lórien juxtaposed against the house of Tom Bombadil as an asylum, a place of safety. But thereafter symmetry becomes increasingly detailed. Two groups of the Fellowship meet strangers in the wilderness, and are helped by them: Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli by Éomer the Rider, as they pursue the orcs and their hobbit-captives across the Rohan prairie; Frodo and Sam by Faramir the Ranger, as they struggle towards Mordor through the woods of Ithilien. The decision to free and assist the members of the Fellowship is in both cases disapproved by the helpful strangers’ superiors, Théoden and Denethor. These two last are furthermore strongly parallel to each other: they are both old men who have lost their sons (Théodred, Boromir) and see Éomer and Faramir as doubtful replacements. They die at almost the same time, at or during the Battle of the Pelennor Fields. Each has a hall which is described in close detail, in IV/6 and V/l respectively, and the two descriptions take on special point if compared with each other – as do the scenes of confrontation between Éomer and Aragorn and Faramir and Frodo in III/2 and IV/5. (Page-references are not always helpful in a work as often reprinted and repaginated as The Lord of the Rings. Where reference to the text may be valuable, I use accordingly Book [not volume] and chapter numbers. Here, for instance, IV/6 means chapter 6 of Book IV, ‘The Window on the West’, in The Two Towers, while V/l means chapter 1 of Book V, ‘Minas Tirith’, in The Return of the King.)

Meanwhile Merry and Pippin are clearly set antithetically to each other, with Merry joining the Riders and Pippin the defenders of Gondor, where each rises to much the same rank. All these points tend to set up a detailed cultural contrast between the Riders and the Gondorians, while at the same time there is a running cultural clash between Legolas the elf and Gimli the dwarf, as there is a clash of policies between Gandalf and Saruman (initially similar to and sometimes mistaken for each other). All the way through the later Books there is moreover a deliberate alternation between the sweeping and dramatic movements of the majority of the Fellowship, and the inching, small-scale progress of Frodo, Sam, and Gollum. The irony by which the latter in the end determines the fate of the former is obvious, remarked on by the characters and by the narrator. Tolkien furthermore went to great lengths to build in moments of connection, as when Legolas sees an eagle near the start of III/2, but does not find out that it was ‘Gwaihir the Windlord’ on an errand from Gandalf till three chapters later; or when Sauron is distracted from guarding against Frodo and Sam by the palantír in the hands of Aragorn. Tolkien also very carefully (and laboriously) created an exact day-by-day chronology for all parties, signalled in the text by such things as the changes of the moon. There is no doubt that Tolkien did all this, little doubt that he meant to, and no doubt again that the effects created of variety, contrast, and irony are in major part responsible for the book’s phenomenal and never-equalled success.

Tolkien, however, had no idea of any of this when he began to write, nor indeed for quite unlikely stretches of time once he did get started. He may have felt himself in rather a quandary after the success of The Hobbit. The Hobbit itself had been published almost by accident, with a pupil who knew of its existence recommending it to a publisher’s representative who encouraged him to send it to Stanley Unwin, and Unwin sr. then giving the typescript to his eleven-year-old son Rayner to read and report on (see Bibliography, pp. 7-8). Once it had come out, had been acclaimed, and Unwin had not unreasonably asked for a sequel, Tolkien must have wondered what to do. The texts he had on hand, and on which he had been working for twenty years already, were versions, in poetry and prose, of the complex of tales associated with the Silmarillion (a complex discussed in detail in chapter V below). He duly sent a selection of these in, from which Unwin made a further selection to pass on this time to an adult and professional reader, Edward Crankshaw. Crankshaw, however, faced with a collection of seemingly genuine ancient legends which made no concession whatsoever to novelistic convention, was baffled, and confessed as much. The story is told in detail by Christopher Tolkien in The Lays of Beleriand, pp. 364-7, but one thing that was clear from the start was that no ‘Silmarillion’ could possibly be seen as a sequel to The Hobbit. Told as much, Tolkien, we now know, began work on the sequel which was to turn into The Lord of the Rings some time between 16th and 19th December 1937, in the university’s Christmas vacation.

Yet however neat the final product, at that point in late 1937, and for long afterwards, Tolkien had no clear plan at all, certainly nothing even remotely like the schema outlined at the start of this chapter. It is an interesting, and for any intending writer of fiction rather an encouraging experience, to read through the selections from Tolkien’s many drafts now published in volumes VI-IX of The History of Middle-earth (The Return of the Shadow, The Treason of Isengard, The War of the Ring, and Sauron Defeated), and to note how long it was before the most obvious and seemingly inevitable decisions were made at all. Tolkien knew, for instance, that Bilbo’s ring now had to be explained and would become important in the story, but he still had no idea of it as the Ring, the Ruling Ring, the Ring-with-a-capital-letter, so to speak: indeed he remarked at an early stage that it was ‘Not very dangerous’ (see The Return of the Shadow, p. 42). Another element arrived at early on was the character who would become Strider, the Ranger, but in several opening drafts this role of guard and guide is taken not by a man, still less by one of the Dúnedain, but by a weatherbeaten hobbit called Trotter, distinguished by his wooden shoes. Tolkien remained strongly attached to this character, and even more strongly attached to the name Trotter, though he was quite perplexed as to how to explain him. In The Return of the Shadow we see Tolkien wondering whether Trotter might perhaps be Bilbo in disguise; or maybe a relative, a cousin, one of the ‘quiet lads and lasses’ led off by Gandalf ‘into the Blue for mad adventures’. Reading these drafts one often feels like saying, as Tolkien had done over the idea of fairy-hobbit marriages, ‘This is, of course, absurd’ (for all critics have 20/20 vision, in hindsight). However Christopher Tolkien notes that more than two years after his father started work on the sequel, he was still ‘without any clear conception of what lay before him’ (The Treason of Isengard, p. 18). ‘Giant Treebeard’ was at this stage hostile, and was the character responsible for the imprisonment of Gandalf, rather than Saruman, who had not yet appeared (The Return of the Shadow, p. 363). There was ‘not a hint’ of Lothlórien or of Rohan (The Return of the Shadow, p. 411), even by the time the Fellowship had reached Moria; Tolkien knew no more than his characters what lay the other side of the mountains. Perhaps the most surprising of the many surprises revealed by the early drafts is that in August 1939, with Tolkien about halfway through what would become Book II, of the eventual six Books, he thought that the work was about three-quarters done, see The Return of the Shadow, p. 370. It is as if he anticipated finishing not at the end of The Lord of the Rings, but at the end of The Fellowship of the Ring. The most determined hindsight, reading these drafts, can find no trace at all of the outline given above.

One critical factor in the development of the whole seems to have been the introduction of the Riders of Rohan, like Treebeard seen originally as enemies, allies of Sauron (The Return of the Shadow, p. 422) – Tolkien was indeed to keep this idea vestigially present in the completed work as a rumour, which Boromir indignantly rejects in II/2, but which is still present in the minds of Aragorn and his companions when they meet the Riders for the first time on the prairie at III/2. However, once they did appear, the Riders expanded the story markedly, and also gave Tolkien an easy way of tapping once more into the source-material of ancient literature. At about the same time he formed the idea of creating a set of linguistic correspondences within Middle-earth, and in the process providing a sensible explanation of the names used in The Hobbit. Tolkien knew (none better) that the dwarf-names he had used in The Hobbit came from Old Norse; but if one thought about it, it was clearly impossible that anything like these names could have survived from the far past of the Third Age. Old Norse is indeed an old language, but not so old that we cannot see its descent from something even older. As far back as Tolkien’s Third Age whatever was the ancestor of Old Norse would be quite unrecognizable. The dwarf-names of The Hobbit must accordingly in strict logic be translations, and so must the hobbit-names; but in that case the real original hobbit-names and dwarf-names ought to have been related to each other in at least the same sort of way as modern English and Old Norse (which are in fact related, even quite closely related). The Riders could then be conceived of as being something linguistically in between hobbits and dwarves, as speaking (and in every detail except one, as being) Old English. Théoden realizes early on that there is some sort of connection between the hobbits and his people, a closer one than there is between the hobbits and the Northern men from whom the dwarves have borrowed their names and the language they use in public; his ancestors and theirs must at some time have lived in close association. Tolkien had worked out this set of relationships by about early 1942 (see The Treason of Isengard, p. 424), and could see his way at last to integrating it with the elvish languages and legends on which he had worked for so long already: this gave his story a clearer shape. However one thing which remains certain is that he was still not working from a plan, an overall design. He was writing his way into the story. Other great works have been written the same way, like Dickens’s novels, composed and published in serial instalments – Tolkien’s notes often look rather like Dickens’s, with both writers in the habit of jotting down a string of possible names for a character till they struck one which seemed to fit. But Tolkien, even more than Dickens, had no conscious idea of where he was going. Seven months after starting work on The Lord of the Rings, he complained that he still had no story (The Return of the Shadow, p. 108). The amazing thing is that this did not stop him trying to write one.