W.H. Auden on LOTR

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At the End of the Quest, Victory
New York Times Book Review, 56.1.22
http://www.nytimes.com/1956/01/22/books/tolkien-king.html?
BOOK REVIEW | 'THE RETURN OF THE KING'
By W. H. AUDEN
THE RETURN OF THE KING
Being the Third Part of "The Lord of the Rings."
By J. R. R. Tolkien
416 pp. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. $5.
[70]First Chapter: 'The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring'
(November 19, 2001)
[71]Book Review | 'The Hobbit': A Delightfully Imaginative Journey
(March 13, 1938)
[72]Book Review | 'The Fellowship of the Ring': The Hero Is a Hobbit
(October 31, 1954)
[73]Book Review | 'The Two Towers': Shadowy World of Men and Hobbits
(May 1, 1955)

In "The Return of the King," Frodo Baggins fulfills his Quest, the
realm of Sauron is ended forever, the Third Age is over and J. R. R.
Tolkien's trilogy "The Lord of the Rings" complete. I rarely remember
a book about which I have had such violent arguments. Nobody seems to
have a moderate opinion: either, like myself, people find it a
masterpiece of its genre or they cannot abide it, and among the
hostile there are some, I must confess, for whose literary judgment I
have great respect. A few of these may have been put off by the first
forty pages of the first chapter of the first volume in which the
daily life of the hobbits is described; this is light comedy and light
comedy is not Mr. Tolkien's forte. In most cases, however, the
objection must go far deeper. I can only suppose that some people
object to Heroic Quests and Imaginary Worlds on principle; such, they
feel, cannot be anything but light "escapist" reading. That a man like
Mr. Tolkien, the English philologist who teaches at Oxford, should
lavish such incredible pains upon a genre which is, for them, trifling
by definition, is, therefore, very shocking.

The difficulty in presenting a complete picture of reality lies in the
gulf between the subjectively real, a man's experience of his own
existence, and the objectively real, his experience of the lives of
others and the world about him. Life, as I experience it in my own
person, is primarily a continuous succession of choices between
alternatives, made for a short-term or long-term purpose; the actions
I take, that is to say, are less significant to me than the conflicts
of motives, temptations, doubts in which they originate. Further, my
subjective experience of time is not of a cyclical motion outside
myself but of an irreversible history of unique moments which are made
by my decisions.

For objectifying this experience, the natural image is that of a
journey with a purpose, beset by dangerous hazards and obstacles, some
merely difficult, others actively hostile. But when I observe my
fellow-men, such an image seems false. I can see, for example, that
only the rich and those on vacation can take journeys; most men, most
of the time must work in one place.

I cannot observe them making choices, only the actions they take and,
if I know someone well, I can usually predict correctly how he will
act in a given situation. I observe, all too often, men in conflict
with each other, wars and hatreds, but seldom, if ever, a clear-cut
issue between Good on the one side and Evil on the other, though I
also observe that both sides usually describe it as such. If then, I
try to describe what I see as if I were an impersonal camera, I shall
produce not a Quest, but a "naturalistic" document.

Both extremes, of course, falsify life. There are medieval Quests
which deserve the criticism made by Erich Auerbach in his book
"Mimesis":

"The world of knightly proving is a world of adventure. It not only
contains a practically uninterrupted series of adventures; more
specifically, it contains nothing but the requisites of adventure...
Except feats of arms and love, nothing occurs in the courtly world-and
even these two are of a special sort: they are not occurrences or
emotions which can be absent for a time; they are permanently
connected with the person of the perfect knight, they are part of his
definition, so that he cannot for one moment be without adventure in
arms nor for one moment without amorous entanglement... His exploits
are feats of arms, not 'war,' for they are feats accomplished at
random which do not fit into any politically purposive pattern."

And there are contemporary "thrillers" in which the identification of
hero and villain with contemporary politics is depressingly obvious.
On the other hand, there are naturalistic novels in which the
characters are the mere puppets of Fate, or rather, of the author who,
from some mysterious point of freedom, contemplates the workings of
Fate.

If, as I believe, Mr. Tolkien has succeeded more completely than any
previous writer in this genre in using the traditional properties of
the Quest, the heroic journey, the Numinous Object, the conflict
between Good and Evil while at the same time satisfying our sense of
historical and social reality, it should be possible to show how he
has succeeded. To begin with, no previous writer has, to my knowledge,
created an imaginary world and a feigned history in such detail. By
the time the reader has finished the trilogy, including the appendices
to this last volume, he knows as much about Tolkien's Middle Earth,
its landscape, its fauna and flora, its peoples, their languages,
their history, their cultural habits, as, outside his special field,
he knows about the actual world.

Mr. Tolkien's world may not be the same as our own: it includes, for
example, elves, beings who know good and evil but have not fallen,
and, though not physically indestructible, do not suffer natural
death. It is afflicted by Sauron, an incarnate of absolute evil, and
creatures like Shelob, the monster spider, or the orcs who are corrupt
past hope of redemption. But it is a world of intelligible law, not
mere wish; the reader's sense of the credible is never violated.

Even the One Ring, the absolute physical and psychological weapon
which must corrupt any who dares to use it, is a perfectly plausible
hypothesis from which the political duty to destroy it which motivates
Frodo's quest logically follows.

To present the conflict between Good and Evil as a war in which the
good side is ultimately victorious is a ticklish business. Our
historical experience tells us that physical power and, to a large
extent, mental power are morally neutral and effectively real: wars
are won by the stronger side, just or unjust. At the same time most of
us believe that the essence of the Good is love and freedom so that
Good cannot impose itself by force without ceasing to be good.

The battles in the Apocalypse and "Paradise Lost," for example, are
hard to stomach because of the conjunction of two incompatible notions
of Deity, of a God of Love who creates free beings who can reject his
love and of a God of absolute Power whom none can withstand. Mr.
Tolkien is not as great a writer as Milton, but in this matter he has
succeeded where Milton failed. As readers of the preceding volumes
will remember, the situation n the War of the Ring is as follows:
Chance, or Providence, has put the Ring in the hands of the
representatives of Good, Elrond, Gandalf, Aragorn. By using it they
could destroy Sauron, the incarnation of evil, but at the cost of
becoming his successor. If Sauron recovers the Ring, his victory will
be immediate and complete, but even without it his power is greater
than any his enemies can bring against him, so that, unless Frodo
succeeds in destroying the Ring, Sauron must win.

Evil, that is, has every advantage but one-it is inferior in
imagination. Good can imagine the possibility of becoming evil-hence
the refusal of Gandalf and Aragorn to use the Ring-but Evil, defiantly
chosen, can no longer imagine anything but itself. Sauron cannot
imagine any motives except lust for domination and fear so that, when
he has learned that his enemies have the Ring, the thought that they
might try to destroy it never enters his head, and his eye is kept
toward Gondor and away from Mordor and the Mount of Doom.

Further, his worship of power is accompanied, as it must be, by anger
and a lust for cruelty: learning of Saruman's attempt to steal the
Ring for himself, Sauron is so preoccupied with wrath that for two
crucial days he pays no attention to a report of spies on the stairs
of Cirith Ungol, and when Pippin is foolish enough to look in the
palantir of Orthanc, Sauron could have learned all about the Quest.
His wish to capture Pippin and torture the truth from him makes him
miss his precious opportunity.

The demands made on the writer's powers in an epic as long as "The
Lord of the Rings" are enormous and increase as the tale proceeds-the
battles have to get more spectacular, the situations more critical,
the adventures more thrilling-but I can only say that Mr. Tolkien has
proved equal to them. From the appendices readers will get tantalizing
glimpses of the First and Second Ages. The legends of these are, I
understand, already written and I hope that, as soon as the publishers
have seen "The Lord of the Rings" into a paper-back edition, they will
not keep Mr. Tolkien's growing army of fans waiting too long.

Mr. Auden is the author of "Nones" and "The Shield of Achilles" among
other volumes of verse.
References
70. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/19/books/chapters/rings-fc.html
71. http://www.nytimes.com/1938/03/13/books/tolkien-hobbit.html
72. http://www.nytimes.com/1954/10/31/books/tolkien-fellowship.html
73. http://www.nytimes.com/1955/05/01/books/tolkien-towers.html
74. http://www.nytimes.com/mem/tnt.html?module=call&alert_context=0&retA=http://www.nytimes.com/1956/01/22/books/tolkien-king.html&retT=At+the+End+of+the+Quest,+Victory
75. http://www.nytimes.com/mem/tnt.html?module=manage&retA=http://www.nytimes.com/1956/01/22/books/tolkien-king.html&retT=At+the+End+of+the+Quest,+Victory

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Topic - W.H. Auden on LOTR - clarkjohnsen 11:46:42 12/20/02 (1)

Thanks for that one. - edta 12:24:10 12/20/02 (0)

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