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Tolkien: A Look Behind The Lord of the Rings
by Lin Carter
(Gollancz, £6.99, 188 pages, hardback, published 31 August 2003.)
Review by Nicholas Whyte
This book, originally published by Ballantine in 1969, has now been
updated by Adam Roberts and republished by Gollancz, billed as
"The companion to The Lord of the Rings". Unfortunately,
it isn't. Tolkienology has come a very long way in the last thirty-five
years, and very little in this book will be new to anyone who has read
Humphrey Carpenter or Tom Shippey.
Even in 1969, the Tolkien-hungry reader could not have been completely
satisfied by this book. Fully a quarter of it is taken up with a synopsis
of the plots of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings,
material that would surely have already been familiar to the average
Tolkien reader. There is a chapter asking if LOTR (as Carter
repeatedly abbreviates it) is satire or allegory. (Conclusion: it is
neither.) A third of the book is taken up with a survey of other works
of epic fantasy, the genre that Carter argues Tolkien's writing belongs
to; completely coincidentally, Ballantine - for whom Carter worked
as an editor - was publishing or about to publish many of the authors
who are namechecked here at the time this book was first published.
Carter identifies epic fantasy as a tradition including Homer, the
chansons de geste, Spenser (who is mentioned often), William
Morris, Lord Dunsany, E.R. Eddison, Fletcher Pratt, and Mervyn Peake.
He makes no attempt to demonstrate the influences of the earlier writers
on Tolkien; indeed where he does identify Tolkien's sources directly,
he ends up appearing to argue that The Hobbit is a rip-off of
Walter de la Mare's The Three Mulla Mulgars (aka The Three
Royal Monkeys) or that the whole of Middle-Earth is based on Wagner's
Ring. (Tolkien himself, of course, famously retorted that the
only similarity between his ring and Wagner's was that they were both
round.)
A single, though long, footnote describes the Swords and Sorcery genre,
including the works of Robert E. Howard, L. Sprague de Camp, Henry Kuttner,
Fritz Leiber and indeed Carter himself, but concludes without further
discussion that these are "not strictly speaking epic fantasy in the
Morris-Dunsany-Eddison-Tolkien tradition at all." This is simply unconvincing.
Carter actually reports Tolkien as saying that he was influenced by
H. Rider Haggard's She (and one can see that Mount Doom owes
something to the climactic scenes of Haggard's novel) and that
he enjoyed Robert E. Howard's Conan books; do we know if he actually
read Dunsany or Eddison, and if so if he liked them? Carter's distinction
between the two types of fantasy is then blurred still further by placing
Alan Garner, Lloyd Alexander and Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea firmly
in the Tolkien tradition.
Adam Roberts, given the impossible job of updating this rather messy
book, sensibly did not try very hard. He has added a chapter on The
Silmarillion (confusingly placed before The Hobbit and The
Lord of the Rings, which fits the internal chronology but not the
way in which most readers will come to it) and updated the section on
more recent fantasy writers. But the gaps are rather obvious: the foreword,
for instance, begins by referring to the 2001-3 film trilogy (presumably
a note by Roberts), and then describes the sub-culture of Tolkien societies
and fanzines in affectionate detail (presumably Carter's original text),
with no reference to the medium through which you are reading these
words. He shouldn't really have bothered. The original book may well
have been the high water mark of Tolkienology at its time, and should
certainly be on the shelf of any committed completist. But it's difficult
to see why anyone should buy this edition.
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