the two. But this too is highly complex, and the one does not follow simply from the other. The significance of the work is neither entirely determined nor limited by the life and times that produced it. And as Tolkien himself reminds us of fairy-stories, ‘when we have done all that research … can do … there remains still a point too often forgotten: that is the effect produced now by these old things in the stories as they are.’ That effect – and only in so far as they are significant for it, Tolkien’s sources, influences and so on – is what interests me.
It is boring and pointless to spill ink on whether Tolkien was ‘reactionary’ or not. Nor can the work itself be pigeonholed in such a ridiculously simplistic way; its meaning is not forever fixed, but rather whatever it presents itself as, in ways that cannot be pre-determined. Indeed, I am going to argue that The Lord of the Rings has a life of its own to an extent far exceeding what Tolkien himself expected or could have anticipated. That life is integral to understanding its enduring appeal.
I have derived aid and support from postmodernist theories of meaning and reading that probably would have inspired mixed feelings in Tolkien himself. These offer the starting-point that meaning is tied to shared linguistic and cultural understandings, on the one hand – so that not anything goes – yet meanings are always open, in principle, to reinterpretation along new and different lines, including ones unsuspected by the author. Tolkien can hardly have known when he was writing, for example, that the 1960s were around the corner, and would take up his books with such enthusiasm.
In a way, I myself am another example in this context. Tolkien was a deeply conservative (with a small c) English Roman Catholic with a highly specialized scholarly interest in the early Middle Ages. The best label for me, on the other hand, might be ‘Radical Eclectic’; I grew up many generations later in mid-Western Canada and the United States, and was deeply influenced by the intellectual, left-libertarian and mystical aspects of the 1960s … including The Lord of the Rings. Without the relative independence of the text, my abiding love of it would be impossible to understand.
Postmodernism also holds that while every discipline will have its own set of critical standards for assessing good and bad work, such standards cannot be grounded in any kind of indisputable foundations or ultimate objectivity. They ‘are’ whatever it is agreed that they are, which of course changes and is never unanimous. So although I have tried to be rigorous and coherent, I make no apology for occasionally explicitly including myself. That is better than pretending to have a total overview from a standpoint that is wholly outside its subject-matter, and therefore supposedly comprehensive and impartial. The contents of books cannot be separated from the sense that particular readers make of them.
Finally, postmodernism has also influenced my account in another important respect. It suggests that we are now living in a time when the project of modernity is approaching exhaustion. What do I mean by modernity? Basically, a ‘world-view’ that began in late seventeenth-century Europe, became self-conscious in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and was exported all over the world, with supreme self-confidence, in the nineteenth. It culminated in the massive attempts at material and social engineering of our own day. Modernity is thus characterized by the combination of modern science, a global capitalist economy, and the political power of the nation-state.
All of these things are now controversial. They used to be justified by the ‘grand narratives’ of modernity – secularized versions of divine revelation, which were supposed to supply essentially complete accounts of our progress towards the realization of the truth (as laid down by Marx, or Freud, or Darwin). But these no longer command widespread respect or assent. There have been too many broken promises, and too many terrible ‘successes’: the gulags of universal liberation through class struggle, modern science’s showcases at Hiroshima and Chernobyl, and the ongoing holocaust of the natural world at the behest of rational economic development. And while I am as grateful as anyone for the benefits of modernity, and wish to throw out no babies with the bathwater, it is impossible now to avoid the fact that the costs have been horrendous, and are, unlike the benefits, increasing.
Modernity carries on, of course. The power of the state still extends to doing whatever it likes to its (willing or unwilling) citizens, restrained here and there only by the fragile conventions of representative democracy. The development of a superstate ideal in Europe has added further to the load. The highly mixed blessings of ‘free’ trade are forced on to weaker countries by stronger through GATT and other menacing acronyms. Scientists, following the logic of ‘pure knowledge’ but backed by big business, are careering ahead with genetic engineering and biotechnology. And when state, science and capital all get together, the result is what Lewis Mumford called ‘the Megamachine.’ Thus, the same people who brought you nuclear energy, agribusiness and the drug and chemical industries are now pursuing the fantastic corporate profits promised by patenting and selling life itself, under the protection of international law. What price a ‘life-form’?
What has changed, with postmodernity, is simply the widespread appearance of questions about the legitimacy and desirability of all this – together with unsettling new reasons and theories for such questions. And people do have questions – more people, with more and deeper fears and worries, than perhaps ever before. Only a fool (or convert, or perhaps employee) would say they are groundless. And one of the things being questioned – not a moment too soon – is the value of the kind of deranged, totalizing rationality, epitomized but by no means restricted to modern science, that produces disenchantment. To quote Zygmunt Bauman, postmodernity, above all,
can be seen as restoring to the world what modernity, presumptuously, had taken away; as a re-enchantment of the world that modernity had tried hard to disenchant … The war against mystery and magic was for modernity the war of liberation leading to the declaration of reason’s independence … world had to be despiritualized, de-animated: denied the capacity of subject … It is against such a disenchanted world that the postmodern re-enchantment is aimed.
I believe Tolkien’s books speak to precisely these conditions. Drawing on the power of ancient Indo-European myth, they invite the reader into a compelling and remarkably complete premodern world, saturated with corresponding earlier values, which therefore feels something like a lost home – and by the same token, offers hope for its recovery. They are just the values whose jeopardy we most now feel: relationships with each other, and nature, and (for want of a better word) the spirit, which have not been stripped of personal integrity and responsibility and decanted into a soulless calculus of profit-and-loss; and practical-ethical wisdom, which no amount of economic or technological ‘progress’ will ever be able to replace. As John Ruskin wonderfully asserted, in the face of Victorian materialist triumphalism in full flood:
To watch the corn grow, and the blossoms set; to draw hard breath over ploughshare or spade; to read, to think, to love, to hope, to pray – these are the things that make men happy; they have always had the power of doing these, they never will have the power to do more. The world’s prosperity or adversity depends upon our knowing and teaching these few things: but upon iron, or glass, or electricity, or steam, in no wise.
But as we begin The Lord of the Rings, this is exactly the world that is under severe threat from those who worship pure power, and are its slaves: the technological and instrumental power embodied in Sauron (after whom the book itself is named, after all), and the epitome of modernism gone mad. We thus find ourselves reading a story about ourselves, about our own world. That is one reason why so many readers have taken it so to heart.