1979 book by Jane Chance
Tolkien's Art: 'A Mythology for England'
is a 1979 book of
Tolkien scholarship
by
Jane Chance
, writing then as Jane Chance Nitzsche. The book looks in turn at Tolkien's essays "
On Fairy-Stories
" and "
Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics
";
The Hobbit
; the fairy-stories "
Leaf by Niggle
" and "
Smith of Wootton Major
"; the minor works "Lay of Autrou and Itroun", "
The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth
", "Imram", and
Farmer Giles of Ham
;
The Lord of the Rings
; and very briefly in the concluding section,
The Silmarillion
. In 2001, a second edition extended all the chapters but still treated
The Silmarillion
, that Tolkien worked on throughout his life, as a sort of
coda
.
Tolkien scholars including
Tom Shippey
and
Verlyn Flieger
, while noting some good points in the book, roundly criticised Chance's approach as seeking to fit his writings into an allegorical pattern which in their view did not exist, and disagreeing with points of detail. They noted that
Bilbo Baggins
, for instance, is nothing like a king. Others commented that the second edition had failed to keep up with advances in Tolkien scholarship. The scholar
Michael Drout
has praised the appropriateness of the subtitle's description of Tolkien's legendarium, "
A mythology for England
", though it seems that Tolkien never used that exact phrase.
Context
[
edit
]
The English philologist
J. R. R. Tolkien
published the bestselling children's book
The Hobbit
in 1937, and the bestselling fantasy novel
The Lord of the Rings
in 1954?1955.
[1]
His fantasy writings were
severely criticised by the literary establishment
. From the 1970s, Tolkien scholars including
Tom Shippey
and
Verlyn Flieger
began to mount a detailed defence of Tolkien.
[2]
Jane Chance
(formerly writing as Jane Chance Nitzsche) is an American scholar, from 1973 at
Rice University
, specializing in medieval English literature, gender studies, and Tolkien.
[3]
Book
[
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]
Publication history
[
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]
Tolkien's Art: 'A Mythology for England'
was first published by
Macmillan
in London in 1979. A paperback edition in Papermac appeared in 1980.
A revised edition was published by the
University Press of Kentucky
in 2001.
[5]
Synopsis
[
edit
]
The Lord of the Rings
resembles
The Hobbit
which ... must acknowledge a great thematic and narrative debt to the Old English epic [
Beowulf
], even though
The Hobbit
'
s happy ending renders it closer to fantasy ... than to the elegy with its tragic ending... Both works have the same theme, a quest on which a most unheroic hobbit achieves heroic stature; they have the same structure, the 'there and back again' of the quest romance, and both extend the quest through the cycle of one year...
Tolkien's Art
, ch. 5 "The Lord of the Rings: Tolkien's Epic"
The first edition had five named chapters, and a short concluding section.
"The Critic as Monster" looked at Tolkien's major essays "
On Fairy-Stories
" and "
Beowulf
: The Monsters and the Critics
". Chance notes the powerful effect that Tolkien's
Beowulf
essay had on scholarship, and that it provoked a lasting controversy over the poem's Germanic and Christian components.
"The King Under the Mountain: Tolkien's Children's Story", dealt with
The Hobbit
. She notes the central place given to the book's two leading monsters,
Gollum
and
Smaug
, and the monstrous aspects of the Elvenking, the Master of Dale, and the dwarf-king, to whom she ascribes "the more 'spiritual' sins" compared to the gluttony, sloth, and anger of the other monsters such as the trolls, goblins, and wargs. She contrasts the "unobtrusive" hobbit
Bilbo Baggins
with the "usually obtrusive" and uncharitable narrator of the story.
"The Christian King: Tolkien's Fairy-Stories", explored the Christian symbolism and allegory of "
Leaf by Niggle
" and "
Smith of Wootton Major
".
"The Germanic King: Tolkien's Medieval Parodies", looked at some minor works, namely "
The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun
", "
The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth
", "Imram", and
Farmer Giles of Ham
, comparing them to
Old English
and
Middle English
works such as
Beowulf
,
The Battle of Maldon
, and
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
.
"
The Lord of the Rings
: Tolkien's Epic" set Tolkien's book in the context of epic works from
Beowulf
to
Le Morte d'Arthur
,
Faerie Queene
and
Don Quixote
. Those books variously explore chivalric and Christian ideals and modern realism, overlaid according to Chance on medieval heroism and medieval Christianity. Chance contrasts Tolkien's "two Germanic lords", the dour legalistic
Denethor
and the loving
Theoden
.
A final brief section dealt with
The Silmarillion
: "Basically the mythology dramatises the conflict between the fallen Vala
Melkor
, or Morgoth, followed by his
Maia
servant
Sauron
and the One, Eru or
Iluvatar
, 'Father of All', although this is not at first apparent because of the bewildering array of tales and characters". She describes the work's themes as "clearly biblical", concluding that Tolkien had "indeed finally written that '
mythology for England
'".
The 2001 revised edition extended all the chapters in the light of
Tolkien scholarship
and of
Christopher Tolkien
's 12-volume
The History of Middle-earth
, but continued to describe
The Silmarillion
as "an appropriate coda to Tolkien's life".
[5]
Reception
[
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]
First edition
[
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]
Reviewing the first edition, Shippey writes that "a proper reading of Tolkien must depend on some sensitivity to the other literatures and views of literature he spent his time considering". In his view, Chance rightly set out to find the "seeds" of Tolkien's "
a mythology for England
" (a phrase due to his biographer
Humphrey Carpenter
)
in the medieval
: it was "regrettable that [her attempt] fails". Shippey writes that Chance does not grasp Tolkien's valuing of the literal: that the
Beowulf
dragon
is still a real dragon, "not yet
Satan
" ? as it would have been a few centuries later. In Shippey's opinion, this "mistake" makes it too easy for the critic to impute meanings that Tolkien did not intend. He gives as example Chance's assertion that Tolkien's talk of disliking allegory since he grew "old and wary enough to detect its presence" must be an allegory, and that his reference to age must mean he did not really dislike allegory: Shippey calls this a perfectly circular argument. He replies that Tolkien in fact definitely liked "strong fierce old men", such as
Aragorn
,
Theoden
King,
Helm Hammerhand
, and
Gandalf
; and that they represent "
that unyielding courage
to which Tolkien gave so high a value, and which he set at the heart of his mythology". He states that Chance has no time for such old-fashioned values, and instead praises
Bilbo
's growth as a "type of the good king". He observes that Bilbo is nothing like a king, and that talk of "types" just muddies the waters. Shippey ends by saying that there are "some" good points in the book: Chance rightly sees "self-images of Tolkien" throughout his fiction; and she is right, too, in seeing Middle-earth as a balance between creativity and scholarship, "Germanic past and Christian present".
[6]
The scholar of literature and religion
David Lyle Jeffrey
, writing in
VII
, states that Chance interpreted Tolkien's various activities ? philology, editing scholarly textbooks, translating, storytelling ? "as roles", a sort of "complex psychological warfare in Tolkien's conscious and subconscious mind". Jeffrey comments that this has the advantage of causing the reader to look at Tolkien in the context of his professional work and intellectual history, but that he fears that she "offers us a more complex and schizophrenic Tolkien" than might be justified by the diversity of his lines of work. He writes that Chance "tries to 'save the appearances' for allegory" by demonstrating that Tolkien deliberately played "as a bad
exegete
". He states, too, that she argued that Tolkien's "old critic" represented
St Augustine
's "Old Man" who adhered to the letter rather than the spirit of the law. Jeffrey doubts that Chance was correct to conclude this, or that there was a mental split between Tolkien the writer and Tolkien the philologist.
[7]
Leslie Stratyner, writing in
Mythlore
, notes that Chance argues that the enemy in
The Lord of the Rings
works mainly as "'a symbolic perversion of Christian rather than Germanic values'". Stratyner objects that the
One Ring
, embodying the nature of Sauron, can be read in terms of the
Anglo-Saxon
practice of giving rings to loyal followers, "twisted to his dark purpose"; his loyal thanes are the
Nazgul
, and they serve him not because they feel loyal and loving towards him, but because he has enslaved them with
magic rings
.
[8]
Second edition
[
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]
The Tolkien scholar
Verlyn Flieger
welcomes the "solid critical work" of the 2001 edition amidst the publicity for
Peter Jackson
's then-forthcoming
films of
The Lord of The Rings
. She agrees with Chance's identification of the
Finnish
Kalevala
as the trigger
for
Tolkien's legendarium
, but found misleading her general comparison with "mythological tales that often begin with creation" ? as diverse as the Bible, Ovid's
Metamorphoses
, and the
Mabinogion
. Flieger agrees with Chance's comparison of
Eru Iluvatar
with God, and the
Valar
with the Bible's
angels
, but writes that Chance "fails to note the equally important differences" where Tolkien intentionally "diverged from these models". Flieger writes that Chance was following Tolkien's intentions in calling the tales of Middle-earth "
a mythology for England
", but that she is not persuaded by Chance's argument that this applies to all of Tolkien's fiction. That would, Flieger writes, leave
The Silmarillion
only as a "'
coda
', as if it were an addendum to the principal composition", ignoring the lifetime's work that Tolkien put into that work, and from which
The Hobbit
and
The Lord of the Rings
both emerged. Finally, she states that Chance follows Tolkien's biographer,
Humphrey Carpenter
, throughout the book in describing Tolkien as "two people", one a dry scholar, the other an artist in words, supporting this with "sound scholarly evidence". Flieger disagrees with some "points of interpretation", writing that "Frodo, not Sam, is 'the real threat to Sauron'" and finds "
Gollum
's sacrifice of himself" an over-generous description of "that unhappy creature". She concludes that the book does explain "the scholarly roots of Tolkien's fiction", and how "those roots nourished the tree".
[5]
The independent scholar Daniel J. Smitherman writes that Chance had narrowed her scope to "the theme of kingship and its adversaries?of the heroes and the monsters". He agrees that in Tolkien, both hero and monster sometimes appear directly, and are sometimes concealed. He finds Chance's 1979 demonstration that Tolkien used (medieval) English literature significant, but by the 2000s there was so much Tolkien scholarship, and it was based on so much more of Tolkien's writing than Chance had access to in the 1970s, that the revision seemed less than valuable; and that would have been true even if Chance's writing style had been better.
[9]
Margaret Hiley, writing in
Modern Fiction Studies
, calls Chance's
Tolkien's Art
and Shippey's
The Road to Middle-earth
"the best" of "many critical studies" of Tolkien's method in creating a new mythology.
[10]
"A mythology for England"
[
edit
]
Tolkien scholars have analysed the extent to which Tolkien intended his
Middle-earth
writings, his
legendarium
, to form "
A mythology for England
", as the book's subtitle proposes. In a 1951 letter to the publisher Milton Waldman, Tolkien wrote "I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story ? the larger founded on the lesser in contact with the earth, the lesser drawing splendour from the vast backcloths ? which I could dedicate simply to: to England; to my country. ..."
[11]
Michael Drout
states that Tolkien never used the actual phrase "A mythology for England", though commentators have found it appropriate as a description of much of his approach in creating Middle-earth.
[12]
In the first edition, the subtitle was placed in inverted commas, indicating that it had been thought to be a direct quotation;
the punctuation marks were removed from the subtitle in the revised edition of 2002, and Tolkien's 1951 letter to Waldman is quoted at length, heading the book's introduction.
[14]
References
[
edit
]
- ^
Carpenter, Humphrey
(1978) [1977].
J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography
.
Unwin Paperbacks
. pp. 111, 200, 266 and throughout.
ISBN
978-0-04928-039-7
.
- ^
Curry, Patrick
(2020) [2014]. "The Critical Response to Tolkien's Fiction". In
Lee, Stuart D.
(ed.).
A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien
(PDF)
.
Wiley Blackwell
. pp. 369?388.
ISBN
978-1-11965-602-9
.
- ^
"Jane Chance, 1973?2011"
. Rice University Department of English. Archived from
the original
on 21 December 2016
. Retrieved
16 December
2016
.
- ^
a
b
c
Flieger, Verlyn
(2002). "[Review:] Tolkien's Art: A Mythology for England. Revised ed. by Jane Chance".
Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts
.
12
(4): 440?442.
JSTOR
43308550
.
- ^
Shippey, Tom
(December 1980). "[Review:] Tolkien's Art: 'A Mythology for England' by Jane Chance Nitzsche".
Notes and Queries
.
27
(6): 570?572.
doi
:
10.1093/nq/27.6.570-b
.
- ^
Jeffrey, David Lyle (March 1980). "Tolkien as Philologist".
VII
.
1
: 47?61.
JSTOR
45295987
.
- ^
Stratyner, Leslie (1989).
"Ðe us ðas beagas geaf (He Who Gave Us These Rings): Sauron and the Perversion of Anglo-Saxon Ethos"
.
Mythlore
.
16
(1): Article 2.
- ^
Smitherman, Daniel J. (2003).
"Revised Editions of Tolkien Scholarship"
(PDF)
.
Rocky Mountain Review
(Spring 2003): 109?111.
- ^
Hiley, Margaret (2004).
"Stolen language, cosmic models: myth and mythology in Tolkien"
.
Modern Fiction Studies
.
50
(4): 838?860.
doi
:
10.1353/mfs.2005.0003
.
S2CID
161087920
.
- ^
Carpenter, Humphrey
, ed. (2023) [1981].
The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien
Revised and Expanded Edition
. New York:
Harper Collins
.
ISBN
978-0-35-865298-4
.
, letter 131 to Milton Waldman (at
Collins
), late 1951
- ^
Drout, Michael D. C.
(2004). "A Mythology for Anglo-Saxon England". In
Chance, Jane
(ed.).
Tolkien and the Invention of Myth: a Reader
.
University Press of Kentucky
. pp. 229?247.
ISBN
978-0-8131-2301-1
.
- ^
Chance, Jane
(2002).
Tolkien's Art: 'A Mythology for England'
.
University Press of Kentucky
. pp. Title, 1.
ISBN
978-0-8131-9020-4
.
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