Читать книгу J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century - Tom Shippey - Страница 9

The creation, or re-creation, of a whole publishing genre is a strange result for a book written without the slightest commercial awareness; in a style which is frequently professorial; and which appeared as a first adult novel when its author was already sixty-two (an event not entirely dissimilar, one might note, to the appearance of Joyce’s Ulysses as a first and last major work when its author was forty).

Whatever one thinks of the last parallel (and there are other parallels between Joyce and Tolkien which might be drawn, see pp. 310-14 below), there can at least be no doubt that – to sum up what has been said above – The Lord of the Rings has established itself as a lasting classic, without the help and against the active hostility of the professionals of taste; and has furthermore largely created the expectations and established the conventions of a new and flourishing genre. It and its author deserve more than the routine and reflexive dismissals (or denials) which they have received. The Lord of the Rings, and The Hobbit, have said something important, and meant something important, to a high proportion of their many millions of readers. All but the professionally incurious might well ask, what? Is it something timeless? Is it something contemporary? Is it (and it is) both at once?

This book attempts accordingly to explain Tolkien’s success and to make out the case for his importance. It follows my earlier book on Tolkien, The Road to Middle-earth (1982, revised edition 1992), but with several differences of emphasis and of understanding. The main one is that The Road to Middle-earth was to some considerable extent a work of professional piety – using piety in the old sense of respect for one’s forebears or predecessors. In it my concern was above all to set Tolkien’s work in a philological context, as outlined above, but in much greater detail. I still feel that the piety was justified, and that the point needed to be made. However, in the first place I have reluctantly to concede that not everyone takes to Gothic, or even (in extreme cases) to Old Norse. Moreover, even professional linguists accept that while one can study language ‘diachronically’, i.e. historically, across time, there is also much to be gained by studying it ‘synchronically’, i.e. as it exists at any given moment. In the same way, while I remain convinced that Tolkien cannot be properly discussed without some considerable awareness of the ancient works and the ancient world which he tried to revive (awareness which I try to promote in the following chapters), I now accept that he needs also to be looked at and interpreted within his own time, as an ‘author of the century’, the twentieth century, responding to the issues and the anxieties of that century. This latter is the way that most people read him, and it is only reasonable to try to follow suit.