GOD OF “SUB-CREATION”

J.R.R. Tolkien and the World he created in “Lord of the Rings.” .

J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic fantasy, as told in Fellowship of the Rings, is one of the rare stories in which the plot, the characters, and the theme grow out of the setting. Setting in literature is often the most overlooked, sometimes the most insignificant part of a story. Character development, theme, and plot, surely more important, take the top roles. However, the setting of a story often determines its mood, its tone, its entire feel. In some stories the setting seems small, perhaps non-existent beyond the main character or hero. In others, the setting is so familiar, and typical of everyday life that it just exists, and fades into the background. Yet, there is also the rare story in which the setting not only exists and manages to stay in the foreground, but is so well developed, so vast, deep, and perhaps unknown that it guides the story, it becomes the story, even becomes or is more than the story itself. The story, though perhaps itself grand in scale, becomes but a small part, a trifle of the entire picture. All other aspects of the story grow out of the setting itself. The reader feels it, and the world becomes alive, and in the end seems real. J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and more specifically, The Fellowship of the Ring. is perhaps one of the single most important tales which has determined how fantasy writers conjure up their books of magic today.

Right from the start, one can feel the vastness of the world they enter once they open a page of The Lord of the Rings. Indeed, the book starts with 24 pages of maps and information concerning Hobbits alone, and it is a "brief summary." As "indeed, the entire tradition of putting maps and appendices on languages, calendars, histories, and cultures in fantasy novels seems to stem almost entirely from Lord of the Rings" (Beacham 2521). From this Tolkien immediately creates a sense of the deepness of his world, hinting that the story truly "takes place against a background of measureless depth"(McLellan 516). Huge, however, is useless if the world is empty, and if there is no true plot it matters not that "no fantasy writer has ever created a world which was anywhere near as detailed as is Tolkien’s Middle Earth"(Beacham 2523). And there are those who feel Tolkien has created a huge world indeed, but a useless one, one that leaves the story, the character, the plot itself in second, leaving nothing but "a hallow, inscribed monument with, many many echoes"(Stimpson 48). Indeed this might seem to be true, as Tolkien’s work was not originally cited for its literary quality but was first noticed "as a cult figure among youths disillusioned with war and the technological age"(CLC-38 430). However, quite the opposite seems to have been created, as in Tolkien’s world it seems every bush, tree, river, hill, and ridge has some deep historical significance, packing the world so tightly that regardless of its vastness, the world is so full even a small echo could not be possible, and it seems "in the Tolkinian world you can hardly put your foot down from Esgaroth to Forlindon or between Ered Mithrinnd Khand without stirring the dust of history"(Lewis 1082). Very honestly one can say that "our own world, except at certain times, hardly seems so heavy with its past"(Lewis 1083). This is the amazing aspect of Tolkien’s world - its sense of history and "the precision of its geography, the colour of the maps beyond the maps’ edges" (Wood 170).

Yet still, a sense of history in a fake universe does not necessarily mean a good story, especially in the realm of character; as many argue that Tolkien’s main cast is a one- dimensional bunch, and that even those that play major roles are left weak, and unexciting. Even some of those that support Tolkien’s work have to admit that perhaps the price of the setting of the great world is that character must suffer and that "when compared to the detailed characters of Henry James or Faulker, his Gandalf and Aragorn do come across as thin"(Beacham 2521). Even Tolkien himself seemed to somewhat support his critics’ ideas in that "he saw himself first and foremost as a scholar and university professor, an Oxford Don. Until very late in his life he considered his fiction to be little more than a hobby" (Beacham 1811). However, this view is merely too picky and critical as the genre from which Tolkien’s story springs is not known for, nor is it truly supposed to have, characters which are extremely complex and unpredictable such as Holden in Catcher in the Rye; and "when examining Tolkien’s use of character development, his technique should be compared not to that of the masters of realistic tradition, but rather to that of the writers of the romance and epic both medieval and modern. Within this context, Gandalf, Aragorn, and the rest seem surprisingly well rounded"(Beacham 2521) And "In Frodo, Tolkien does approach the complexity of character which one is accustomed to finding in a modern novel"(Beacham 2521). And if perhaps the characters are "thin," this shortcoming is made up for with the huge variety and wealth of not just characters, but entire races. "There are Dwarves, Orcs, Elves, Hobbits, Ents, Men, Dragons, Wizards, Trolls, Goblins, Ghosts, all sharply differentiated, all speaking their own dialects"(Wood 169).

Other books and works of literature that have tried similar approaches in setting have had much the same problem as Tolkien, except often the problems are at a larger scale. Such an example would be Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Though very different books in their nature, Clarke also acknowledges, or perhaps even brags of, the grandness of the universe in which his story takes place, noting in regard to his universe (our real universe)

"there are approximately a hundred billion stars in our local universe, the Milky Way. So for every man who has ever lived, in this Universe there shines a star"every one of those stars is a sun, often itself much more brilliant and glorious than the small nearby star we call the sun"(Clarke XVII).

Clarke’s grand setting bears other resemblance to Tolkien’s work as well. Both can be said to have their character etc. grow out of the setting, in 2001 perhaps even more literally than The Lord of the Rings as scientifically, everything does "grow" from the setting. Both are crammed with detail, although in very different ways. Tolkien’s detail works in the trees and bushes, while Clarke’s detail is in the intensely detailed and realistic psychics and technology. However, with 2001, many believed that Clarke had gotten so caught up with the grand ideas and setting that the actual plot, and most definitely the characters (with the possible exception of HAL), suffered greatly. However 2001, the book, and the movie, like Tolkien’s work, was not a work which should be seen for its character growth, as that is not what it is meant to convey. Like Lord of the Rings, it is unique, and should be viewed for what it is. It gets across what it wants to get across. "It says to us: We became men when we learned to think. Our minds have given us the tools to understand where we live and who we are. Now it is time to move on to the next step, to know that we live not on a planet but among the stars, and that we are not flesh but intelligence" (Ebert).

And thus in the end, its originality and huge setting makes it one of "the greatest science fiction of all time and our time"(Time, Cover).* Whatever the case with character, the main achievement of The Lord of the Rings is the way the story grows out of and is so closely related to the setting and world. "The utterly new achievement of Professor Tolkien is that he carries a comparable sense of reality unaided. Probably no book yet written in the world is quite such a radical instance of what its author has elsewhere called ‘sub-creation’"(Lewis 1083). The races, the quests, the objects, they all spring from the setting which ties them together into a whole. Hobbits live in the shire, Elrond in Rivendell, and the ring itself is from Mordor. This connecting of everything to the setting makes every object not just something which suddenly appears out of the writer’s imagination, but something which can be traced back, which is grounded in more of a reality. And through this, the lessons and symbolism of The Lord of the Rings arises, although Tolkien himself denies there is any. In fact "he maintained that The Lord of the Rings was conceived with ‘No allegorical intentions’"but he also denied the trilogy is a work of escapism" (CLC-38 430). This "measureless depth" (McLellan 516) which is found in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings may partly spring from the great changes in the world which occurred while Tolkien was writing his great books. Born in 1892 in South Africa (CLC-38 430), Tolkien’s inspiration for vital parts of his later created world can be seen such as in Warwickshire England, which "eventually became the inspiration for Tolkien’s shire" (Beacham 1810). Even some of the characters’ origins which seem so firmly grounded in Tolkien’s world can be seen in Tolkien’s past. Such an example can be seen in Tolkien’s Goblins, which quite possibly spring from the Germans of World War I. In his books, Tolkien describes the Goblins as a very smart and clever race but evil with their inventions. This fits strangely well with Tolkien’s experience when he served in WWI, in which he fought in the front lines and "survived the horrors of trench warfare including a bad case of trench foot"(Beacham 1810). And to go along with this evidence, Tolkien’s interest in writing stories can be traced back to at least 1917" (Beacham 1810), the same time he suffered from trench foot. So, Tolkien’s work which became the foundation for The Lord of the Rings, was started when the world was still in its technological infancy and was finished when the world was quite a different place with great jet airplanes and nuclear bombs. This can almost surely be attributed to the variety and deepness of Tolkien’s world.

And perhaps ironically, even the great setting of which the characters, plot, and theme seem to spring from, spring from something else. Just as in our Universe one seems to never be able to trace back to the true beginning, nor can one call Tolkien’s setting the true start, the true thing from which all else springs. In fact, the beginning seems to be quite unexpectedly, language. Indeed "Tolkien began creating his own languages and mythologies at an early age and later wrote stories and poems to provide them with a narrative framework"(CLC-38 430). Tolkien himself said, "The stories were made..to provide a world for the languages rather than the reverse"(CLC-38 430). Perhaps it is ironic that the setting which seems to create all grows out of languages, but yet perhaps it is fitting, as there is nothing more deep and complex than entire languages.

Tolkien’s world may not be enough to gain the respect of every critic for his The Lord of the Rings, but in the end, it is really the setting, the history of the great world, which drives the story, which in itself is just a small fraction of the great picture, which it seems will forever be left unfinished. Without the world, Tolkien’s books would falter as Tolkien’s strength lies there, as he "is an adept painter of scenes and evoker of images who can orchestrate his narrative and descriptive effects with flexibility and variety"(Fuller 335). In the end, no matter what one thinks they cannot deny that Tolkien "helped revive the medieval romance and the fairy tale" (CLC-38 430), and that Tolkien’s story is as "brilliant in its telling as it is broad in its scope"(Dolbier 1). *Refers to the cover of 2001: A Space Odyssey