A cinematic juggernaut has just rolled into town. With
the first film in the new Hobbit trilogy, its director, Sir
Peter Jackson, has embarked on a quest to repeat his Lord of the Rings omnispectacular. Over
the next few weeks we may have to become accustomed to images of Baggins in
Burger King and Mordor in McDonald’s. The media hype which all this marketing
guff engenders will no doubt cause our literary and cultural custodians to
remind us (with that form of detached ennui which they have perfected) that
Tolkien is no more than a sort of reactionary Harry Potter.
Philip Pullman was therefore right to denounce it all as “infantile” and
Richard Eyre justified when he termed Middle Earth the “Kingdom of Kitsch”. Jim
Naughtie will continue to sigh when any reference to J.R.R. Tolkien is made on
the Today programme—and Mark Lawson will
tell BBC Radio 4 audiences that this form of bread and circuses isn’t a patch
on Ken Loach’s recent outing into poverty among Asian minorities in Bootle.
But wait. Things are not as they seem.
There is an agenda here. There usually is when it comes to popular culture—but
in the case of Tolkien we are looking at big politics. For the author of The
Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion and The
Hobbit was the
greatest conservative writer of the second-half of the 20th century. No—not in
an Ayn Rand sense, nor in the raw modernist style embraced by T.S. Eliot or
Wyndham Lewis. Rather, Tolkien combined remarkable talents for story-telling
and philology with a matching ability to communicate conservative values and
images with unequalled popularity. His pre-history of the West is dominated by
hereditary structures and a settled social order that appealed to the nostalgia
of a postwar generation. He was clearly doing something right, given that Rings has sold more copies than
almost any other work of fiction in history. It has been voted the nation’s
favourite novel in England, Australia, the US and even Germany.
It is this astonishing success that
underlies the fierce hostility one encounters from a literary and cultural
establishment dominated by the liberal Left (notwithstanding the brief
counter-cultural popularity which Rings had in the 1960s). While by no means
all on the Right “get” Tolkien (the poet John Heath-Stubbs called it “a
combination of Wagner and Winnie-the-Pooh”), all too often those who should
know better are simply carried along by an ill-informed deference to
established critics who shout louder. Too many conservatives simply do not
engage in this area of cultural politics—and then naively wonder at general
elections why the broadcast media is pumping out an undercurrent of left-wing
assumptions which have scarcely moved on since 1945.
For the Left political battles are won
indirectly through the domination of institutions, the professions, culture and
received thought. The idea that our children, visual media and society could be
significantly influenced by the social conservatism of Middle Earth is anathema
to that world view. Germaine Greer wrote: “It has been my nightmare that
Tolkien would turn out to be the most influential writer of the 20th century.
The bad dream has materialised.” E.P. Thompson blamed the Cold War mentality on
“too much early reading of The Lord of the Rings”. Rosemary Jackson described
his works as “conservative vehicles for social and instinctual repression”.
This is some claim for a set of novels that does not mention economics, sex or
religion.
For too long lazy assumptions were made
that the Tolkien universe was merely an extended fairy story about trolls,
elves and little folk—as if Animal Farm was simply a behavioural study of
farmyard life. Many of these calumnies were expressed by those who had not
read—let alone understood— the books. Other critics simply saw this as a
convenient way to dismiss what they regarded as a regressive, archaic and
therefore dystopian vision of human society.
While Tolkien had an aversion to allegory
(and looking for the “meaning” in a novel is always hazardous) it is important
to understand that he was writing about England and the wider struggle for
Western survival. The novels were written through the terrible prism of the
Great War in which, he wrote, “by 1918 all but one of my close friends were
dead”. Tolkien’s world died in the months which followed the Christmas truce of
1914. It is surely this which drove his anguished description of the Nírnaeth
Arnoediad or the “Battle of Unnumbered Tears” in The Silmarillion when so many
of the noble Eldar were slaughtered. He writes of honour, service and
country—and yet those who are victorious cannot live in the world they have
protected (“I saved the Shire—but not for me,” Frodo laments). The central
theme of The Lord of the Rings is, in the words of one critic, “death, the passing
of beauty so that it can be saved, and the renunciation of power for the sake
of love”. The story is undoubtedly spiritual, without ever mentioning God.
Beyond this, it should also not be forgotten that The Lord of the Rings ends up
with the Hobbits returning to their homeland, finding a totalitarian and
collectivist regime has been imposed on the good folk of the Shire, and
overthrowing it in a bloody popular coup. The attack on post-war socialism
could not be more direct.
And what of the films? Described by the US
blogger Spengler (David Goldman) as “the most important cultural event of the
past decade”, Peter Jackson’s cinematic interpretation of Rings was generally
faithful to the books and equally potent. Released originally around the same
time as 9/11, the superlative second film (coincidentally entitled The Two
Towers) reflected the melancholy of the novel and mirrored the geopolitical
events of the day in more than just the title. As the captains of the West are
besieged by a foe aiming only at their total destruction, they clamour: “What
can men do against such reckless hate?” King Théoden elegises with foreboding:
“Where is the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing? They
have passed like rain on the mountain, like wind in the meadow. The days have
gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow. How did it come to this?”
How indeed, the Western world asked itself, as New York, the Pentagon and later
London, Madrid and Bali came under attack from a medieval enemy of civilisation
itself.
While its millenarian and anti-relativist
themes received much approval from audiences, it was attacked in some quarters
as racist (white-skinned heroes attacking darker-skinned foes), and even Libby
Purves joined in this extraordinary attack in her weekly Times column.
Opposition to taking Tolkien seriously as an author was unabated in many
literary circles, although it was around this time that a number of academics
on the Right began to explore the phenomenon which the cult of Middle Earth had
become. None of this prevented a second enormous wave of popularity for the
novels and films, as new generations found fresh stimulation and fulfilment in
the Tolkien oeuvre.
The allusions to the Tolkien universe are
now everywhere. Viewers of The Thick of It are used to Tolkien references being
the currency of thought for Tory special advisers. It is said that Cameron’s
task in opposition was compared in real life by colleagues to that of the
diminutive hero with hairy feet. The new Hobbit movies have already caused
major political strife in New Zealand, where the conservative National
Government and Peter Jackson had to combine to crush a truculent union movement
bent on disrupting the films. More recently they have even come under attack
from the animal rights movement. Doubtless the approach of the commentariat in
Britain will be first to ignore the new Hobbit films, then to denigrate them
(or their source) and finally to tell us that, if we simply must read fantasy,
we should “of course” prefer J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter or Philip Pullman’s
equally empty His Dark Materials trilogy. However, the former is a
one-dimensional construct which intellectually extends no further than the
imagined walls of Hogwarts—while the latter is a leftist polemic, the film
adaptation of which was a critical and box-office failure.
A.N. Wilson opened his recent Age of
Elizabeth II with a tribute to Tolkien, whom he regarded as the towering
English literary genius of the Queen’s reign. For him Tolkien presaged the
postwar destruction of English life and the dismantling of our cohesive social
conventions. The yeoman-republic of the Shire was largely unregulated but
governed by a common understanding of how people should behave in order for
society to function. It was suspicious of the motives of all those who sought
power and—after his experience of societies run by Hitler, Stalin and
Mao—Tolkien was even driven to say: “I would arrest anyone who uses the word
‘State’.” This professor of Anglo-Saxon would have loathed our brave new world
with government of thought and deed by state regulation and acronym. Tolkien
offers us instead a world of self-governing free people with, perhaps, an
excessive reverence for the past over the future.
For conservatives, the extraordinary
devotion to the author should perhaps confirm that a majority of people incline
emotionally to a world of old-fashioned social tranquillity, conformity and
order. The message of The Lord of the Rings is both tragic and heroic, and
lacks the depressing cynicism and pessimism of modern literature—bizarrely seen
by some as necessary for academic peer approval. If that is the reality of
popular opinion, then those who lay claim to be our cultural arbiters ought to
take note. “The facts of life,” as Chris Patten once said, “are Conservative.” So it seems is our mainstream culture.
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