As I said in my blog
about my Encyclopedia adventure, I spent endless hours scanning the critical
literature on Tolkien for mentions of my topics: The East, The South and The
Treason of Isengard. I never found my mythically imagined “perfect tome”,
The Treason of Isengard: A Scholarly Evaluation.
Let’s face it: Treason is part of a seamless four-volume set, and my
discovery of citations of Treason by scholars using HoLR to make
a point about Tolkien’s writing of LotR were purely based on odds: drawn
from three and a half volumes, a little over one quarter of their references
would probably be to Treason. For the purposes of my article, of course,
I would make it sound like Treason was the prime source for their
brilliant insights.
Who? Well, you can read all the Tolkien criticism you want, and in the end
you’re going to cite Tom Shippey and Verlyn Flieger. They both make very
interesting points about Tolkien, using (at least in part) Treason as a
source. Here’s Tom, sorry, it’s Professor Shippey to you and me:
How did Tolkien’s creativity work? A good deal has
been said about self-reflection, ‘sleepwalking’ and creating ‘imaginative
space’. Yet there is one further thought generated powerfully by reading
Tolkien’s early drafts, though to elaborate it seems to conceded advantage to
some of his fiercest critics. This is—I put it candidly in the hope of
answering candour—that the drafts suggest his critics sometimes had the right
idea; they detected in the finished work tendencies much more obvious in the
medial stages, as also, on occasion and even more suggestively, motifs which
remained forever buried to author and readers alike. Thus Edwin Muir (see
above, p. 154) said that the non-adult nature of The Lord of the Rings
was proven by its lack of genuine casualties. Théoden, Denethor, Boromir—these
are the kind of characters who can be picked out in every Western as
to-be-dispensed-with before the end. I have replied to Muir above. Yet in all
candour one has to say that the early ‘phases’ of The Lord of the Rings
show Tolkien struggling hard to prove Muir right. He really did not like scenes
of pain. So, in The Treason of Isengard, we find Frodo laboriously
explaining to Sam that though the orc hit him with a whip, he was still wearing
his mithril-coat and didn’t feel it (p. 336, but cp. LOTR, p. 889) . . . .
And yet, of course, Tolkien did not persist with them. He wrote them in, and
then he wrote them out. It may well have gone against his own personal grain: I
note elsewhere (p. 232 above) that as soon as Tolkien did reach a hard solution
he was liable to begin to soften it, and we can see now that reaching it was
for him a laborious business in the first place. Still, grain or no grain,
labour or no labour, he did it. Comparison of The Lord of the Rings with
its drafts shows that Muir detected a tendency; his criticism of the entire and
finished work remains false. (pp. 318-19)
And yet, in spite of all this, Dr. Brooke-Rose has a point. She feels that
The Lord of the Rings, viewed as fantasy, is weighed down by
‘hypertrophic’ realism, by ‘naïve and gratuitious intrusions from the realistic
novel’. Must genres always practice apartheid? Evidently not. Still, reading
the drafts of The Lord of the Rings does make it clear what a temptation it was
for Tolkien to fall back on the familiar clichés of the realistic novel . .
.What Tolkien’s sometimes maddening hesitations show is exactly how difficult
he found that blend of ancient and modern, realistic and fantastic, which in
the end he developed so successfully, and so much to his critics’
disapproval. . . . Like Muir [Brooke-Rose] does see, with a certain
insight, what [Tolkien] was tempted to be. The final point to make, obviously,
is that while Tolkien might not have eradicated every trace of soft-heartedness
(Muir) or ‘realistic hypertrophy’ (Brooke-Rose), he did nevertheless in the end
and painfully fight off most of both temptations. -- The Road to
Middle-earth, revised and expanded edition, Tom Shippey, 2003, p.
321-22.
Shippey had to revise The Road to Middle-earth, originally published in
1982, in 2003 to accommodate the material revealed in the HoME.
A. Is this in itself an indication of just how important HoLR is?
B. But how important is HoLR, since it really doesn’t always give the
full drafts of LotR?
C. Do you agree with Shippey that Tolkien “mostly” eliminated
“soft-heartedness” and “realism” in Lord of the Rings, even though he
showed clear signs of both in his drafts?
D. If you’ve read Treason, or if you’ve perhaps reviewed my outlines
posted for this discussion, have you noticed any examples besides Shippey’s of
Tolkien’s sloppiness or sentimentality or generic quality as a writer, that
were eliminated or at least improved in the final version?
Now Tom – sorry: Now Prof. Shippey is good, but Verlyn Flieger is a total
Treason nut. In her remarkable second Tolkien book, A Question of
Time: J. R. R. Tolkien’s Road to Faërie, she draws on Treason as a
major source not just once but twice. She’s a godsend for all struggling
Encyclopedia writers. I can’t find any simple single passage to cite, which
shows how deeply embedded Treason is in her arguments.
1. In Chapter 4 “Over a Bridge of Time” she discusses the whole question of the
nature of time in Lothlorien. Remember Legolas’ speech on how Elves perceive
time? Originally Tolkien had the idea that time in the “outside world” did not
progress while the Fellowship was in Lorien. He realized this was untenable,
and developed a more sophisticated, less literal explanation for what Sam and
the other mortals in the Fellowship experienced. Flieger concludes that Tolkien
wanted to convey a feeling, not invent an actual alternate physics. She
compares the drafts in Treason to the final text, and demonstrates how
Tolkien’s language on this subject became more vague and evocative, and less
literal.
2. In Chapter 8 “Frodo’s Dreams” she reviews Tolkien’s attempts to have Frodo
dream of what is happening to the missing Gandalf during the flight from
Hobbiton to Bree. The drafts for these chapters are presented in both The
Return of the Shadow and Treason. As his concept of what had
happened to Gandalf changed, Tolkien kept changing the points in the story when
Frodo had dreams, to keep parallel with the new chronologies. He finally
realized that Frodo’s dreams could be a form of “time travel” as well as “space
travel” – time travel being a favorite Tolkien subject (and the topic of
Flieger’s book). In the final text, you may remember, at the Council of
Elrond, Frodo tells Gandalf “I saw you” escaping from Isengard, and Gandalf
answers that his dream “was late in coming”, i.e., Frodo had had a vision of
the past, not the present. Flieger uses the drafts in Treason to
demonstrate how Tolkien found a way to introduce the concept that a seemingly
ordinary Frodo was gifted in ways the other hobbits were not, and also to begin
the theme of out-of-time experiences that are seen again and again later in the
book.
E. What other out-of-time experiences does Tolkien put into LotR?
F. If Flieger did not have the access to Tolkien’s drafts that
Treason and the other HoME books give, would her arguments be as strong?
Isn’t the published LotR rich enough by itself to allow thinking and
coming to fully-formed critical conclusions about Tolkien’s ideas about time
and dreams?
G. To what degree do you like reading criticism about Tolkien and his
creativity, compared to reading criticism about The Lord of the
Rings?
Another very interesting book I found, that uses Treason extensively, is
The Uncharted Realms of Tolkien by Lewis and Currie (2002). Now these
authors are not in Shippey’s and Flieger’s league on a number of counts, but
there’s no doubt they’ve read their Treason (and the rest of HoLR)
thoroughly. Their 50-page chapter “Maps beyond the Lord of the Rings” wanders
and meanders through the entire History of the Lord of the Rings at a
depth I’ve not encountered in any other critical book on Tolkien. They pursue a
number of various arguments, but their familiarity with the HoLR texts is so
good that they presume to draw different conclusions from the draft material
than Christopher Tolkien himself did. For instance they address the question of
just when JRRT finally realized that the world he had created in The
Hobbit, and expanded in “The New Hobbit”, was the same “Middle-earth” that
the Silmarillion tales take place in; they conclude that it was a year or so
later than CT thought it was.
Leaving you with that thought to chew on, I’ll cite their comment on Tolkien’s
famous dictum about his maps:
Carpenter quoted a saying of Tolkien’s in the
Biography (p. 198) about geographical content: he [Tolkien] once said ‘If
you’re going to have a complicated story you must work to a map; otherwise
you’ll never make a map of it afterwards.’ One is moved to suggest that this
was based upon bitter personal experience with exactly such a daunting problem.
It seems that Tolkien did not sit down and develop the maps during the writing
of ‘The Lord of the Rings’ soon enough, and thus inconsistencies sprang from
that which CJRT points out time and again in the volumes of HOME that deal with
LotR. -- The Uncharted Realms of Tolkien, p. 138.
H. Are Lewis and Currie being fair here? If Tolkien did not resolve all the
map/text problems in LotR, aren’t there other instances where he did revise his
text to follow whatever the state of his map actually was? Or are Lewis and
Currie right that Tolkien’s statement has been misinterpreted all along, and
should taken as rueful rather than boastful?
I. Is this an example of the kind of “risk” to an author that Rosebury
talked about? Is Tolkien’s seeming ‘wisdom’ expressed in his Letters and
Biography, about writing according to a map, revealed by his posthumously
published drafts to be more or less poppycock?
With no disrespect meant to Gloriana St. Clair, I’ll skip her piece (quickie
summary: Treason shows that Tolkien generally “darkened” his material
when revising it) and go on to the final piece that I found worth citing:
“Re-vision: The Lord of the Rings in Print and on Screen”, by Diana
Paxson, in Tolkien on Film, ed. Croft, 2004. She cites Treason
repeatedly as part of a two-part presentation of how Tolkien revised his plot
and characters while writing LotR and how screenwriters Boyens, Walsh and
Jackson revised their approach to adapting LotR to film. Paxson doesn’t really
make a connection between the two processes beyond the fact that both parties
revised what they initially wrote (surprise!) – but I detected a hint of
implication that the films’ changes to Tolkien’s storylines and characters are
perhaps more justifiable once you understand that the text of LotR itself was
radically changed again and again in the writing (as exemplified by
Treason).
J. Do you agree?
I found the entire article weaker than any of the previous three by a large
factor. A few of the other RR Encyclopedists, reviewing my article, questioned
whether it even belonged in my summary of critical uses of Treason. But
I included it, and kept it in despite their questions, because citing Tolkien
criticism that addresses the New Line Films made the Encyclopedia seem more up
to date.
K. What do you think? Should film critics study and refer to Tolkien’s
texts, and Tolkien critics study and refer to the films? Are the New Line films
“Tolkien”?
Well, that’s it, folks. I had rounded up some critics who put Treason to
some use, even if the critics were mostly the “usual suspects.” Here’s how I
crammed them all into the remaining 200-odd words that were left from my
original 1000-word limit:
Scholars generally
refer to material in Treason to examine Tolkien’s process of creation by
revision. Flieger establishes that Tolkien repeatedly changed his presentation
of the different time-flow in Lórien, in order to make it less literal and
specific; and she shows how Tolkien changed Frodo’s dreams in Book 1 to become
journeys in time as well as space (Flieger 1997, 89 & 175). Shippey finds in
Treason examples of what he had previously argued was absent from LotR,
concluding that Tolkien successfully struggled to overcome his own early
inclinations towards excessive novelistic realism, and “soft-heartedness” about
the fates of his characters (Shippey 2003, 318). St. Clair demonstrates how
Tolkien’s revisions tend overall to darken the story from its first drafts (St.
Clair 1996, 146).
Treason provides material for other critical
approaches also. Lewis and Currie draw on it extensively to argue that Tolkien
connected LotR to the Silmarillion legends much later than is suggested
by CT (Lewis & Currie 2002, 96). Less successful is an essay that draws
parallels between Tolkien’s transformation of Trotter into Aragorn in
Treason, and the screenwriters’ changes to Aragorn’s character in the
New Line film adaptations (Paxson 2004, 92).
194 words! Total article: 1008 words. Done, done, done! Upload it to Routledge,
relax, have a drink, and then start returning a lot of books to the library!
L. Final bonus question: do you agree with Michael Drout’s comment: “No one
should write Tolkien criticism without making the effort to read The History
of Middle-earth.”?
The Critics Speak:
The most striking revision of all, one also noted by Christopher Tolkien, appears in a draft of the preceding chapter, “Farewell to Lórien,” in which two canceled sentences and Tolkien’s note on their cancellation reinforce speculations about whether time does or does not pass and supply the rationale for the debate in all its versions. As the Company prepares to leave Lórien, their Elf-guide Haldir announces, “I have just returned from the Northern Fences . . . and I am sent now to be your guide again. [struck out: There are strange things happening away back there. We do not know the meaning of them. But].” Above the canceled words is penciled the provocative comment “This won’t do—if Lórien is timeless, for then nothing will have happened since they entered” (Treason of Isengard, 286). Tolkien’s mind here is plain. It “won’t do” to have an Elf in a timeless land report things happening in time. (Verlyn Flieger, A Question of Time: J. R. R. Tolkien’s Road to Faërie, pp. 103-04)squire online:
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