Tolkien Reread 1: ‘The Ring Sets Out’

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Thing is, I’m writing a short-ish History of Fantasy — I signed the contract earlier this week, and am looking to deliver the book to the publishers by the end of the year. I’ve spent the last few weeks collating bits and pieces I’ve already written on the topic, and am starting now to draft new material.

At the moment I’m re-reading Lord of the Rings. It used to be the case that I re-read this book every year, from my early teens right through into early middle age, but the truth is I haven’t re-read it for a while now. So I’m going through it again.

One way of approaching a ‘History of Fantasy’ would be to include everything — every story, from our earliest days, that includes anything fantastical, anything non-mimetic, magical, monstrous, wondrous, from the Epic of Gilgamesh through the Odyssey and the New Testament, through Beowulf and medieval romance and Journey to the West, through Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost, Prometheus Bound and The Water Babies, Wagner’s Ring and William Morris, through to Conan, Fritz Leiber, Tolkien and Lewis, Ursula Le Guin and so on. But this would hardly be a ‘short’ history. As I have said before, on this and other blogs, I regard ‘the fantastic’, in this sense, as the default mode of human storytelling — ‘realism’, le naturalisme, is a significant but, in the larger scheme, minor offshoot from this way of telling stories.

Another way would be to look at the explosion of interest in heroic fantasy and sword & sorcery through the second half of the 20th- (continuing into the 21st): to trace out the genealogies of writing that fed into this boom, and the ways the mode has grown subsequently. That means accounting for the extraordinary success of Tolkien, and to a lesser extent Lewis, and the way they acted as a catalyst for a florescence in the mode. I have, I think, a rough model of the broader discursive-etymology of Middle Earth/Narnia — their strange hybrid of medieval/Anglo-Saxon and bourgeois 19th/20th century worldbuilding, their Arthurianism (once-and-future kingishness, merlin-y wizards, battles of good against evil), their complex relationship to allegory — and also their relationship to the tradition of Scottian historical fiction and literary antiquarianism (I say more about this below). There’s a lot more to Fantasy in the 20th-century than just Tolkien and Lewis of course, in particular the distinctive US tradition of heroic fantasy, sword and sorcery, Howard, Leiber, Peter Beagle (I talk a bit about that here). And there’s a lots to say about the range and spread of post-Tolkienian stuff: imitation, grimdark, Pratchettian comic fantasy, antiquarian fantasy like Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, YA fantasy and school stories (Potter) and, moving into the 21st century, the glorious diversification of fantasy into stories based on cultures and histories other than European medievalism: African and Asian fantasy writing, postcolonial writing. All very exciting.

But for now I’m laying the keel of a chapter on Tolkien and revisiting this, for me, much-read author.

So Fellowship of the Ring (1954) is divided into two ‘books’. Tolkien suggested, and some editions use, the titles ‘The Ring Sets Out’ and ‘The Ring Goes South’, although my edition just has ‘Book 1’ and ‘Book 2’. Today some thoughts on the setting out.

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The last time I undertook a comprehensive re-read was all the way back in 2009. Here’s what I thought of Book One, then:

When I used to read it as a teenager, this was always my least favourite section. I hurried through on my way to what I then considered the book’s first highlight, the Mines of Moria, and the shivers that sent up my spine. But I’ve now re-read it with a new appreciation. There’s something very clever, novelistically speaking, about the way Tolkien beds-in his larger narrative. I like the slow pulse of the first book, with its day-night alternations of comfortable domiciles (the Shire, Crickhollow, Bree, heading for Rivendell) and dangerous or disorienting wild spaces inbetween. But above all I like the way the characters keep getting lost, and the way in turn this propensity for getting lost glosses one of the novel’s central conceits — invisibility. The hobbits set out with a clear aim in view, and they are neither excessively foolish nor inexperienced ramblers. Yet when they go into the Old Forest, or when they set out across the Barrow Downs, lost is what they get: because (in both cases) they cannot see properly. The trees in the former, and the fog in the latter, makes as it were the rest of the world invisible. It’s a nice, photographic-negative of the way the ring can render one individual invisible. The writing stands-up better than I remember, too. Not all of it, by any means (‘“Lawks!” said Merry’ [116]); but some of the descriptive passages about landscape are lovely:

As they journeyed the sun mounted, and grew hot. Each time they climbed a ridge the breeze seemed to have grown less. When they caught a glimpse of the country westward the distant forest seemed to be smoking, as if the fallen rain was steaming up again from leaf and root and mould. A shadow now lay upon the edge of sight, a dark haze above which the upper sky was like a blue cap, hot and heavy. [151–2]

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The descriptions of landscape and nature still strike me as beautifully done, and they feed-through into my sense of the novel as pastoral, concerning which I’ve written at some length. But this read-through I was struck by something else. There is a whole lot of disguise, incognito and alias-ing in this first sixth of the whole, and — interestingly — that’s not something that is maintained through the rest of the book.

Two things, broadly, are dropped from this portion of the novel in adaptation, simply omitted when the book is reworked for radio or cinema. One is the erasure of Tom Bombadil from the story, an absence often discussed and indeed lamented by fans. But the other is never talked about so far as I can see. It’s this: Frodo and his companions leave the Shire, under false pretences. To cover the fact that they are porting the dangerous ring, and (?) throw the Black Riders off their scent (but how?) they tell people that Frodo is moving to a new house, at Crickhollow on the far side of the Brandywine river. Not only do they say this: Merry and Fatty Bolger actually buy an entire house, furnish it with all mod cons (‘“A bath!” cried Pippin. “Oh blessed Meriadoc!”’ [ch 5]) and fully stock its larder. The first portion of the journey is the hobbits making their way to this house — a fake domicile, because Frodo has no intention of staying there. As soon as they arrive Frodo reveals his true purpose to the others: ‘“Well!” said Frodo at last, sitting up and straightening his back, as if he had made a decision. “I have got something to tell you all. But I don’t know quite how to begin.”’ He’s heading straight off, for Rivendell.

You can see why adaptors ditch this whole ‘new house purchase cover-story’ plot-element: it’s baffling, and is moreover unneedful — Frodo can just head straight from the Shire to Rivendell. What interests me is the element of disguise inherent in the ruse, for disguise, subterfuge and misdirection run through Book 1. Bilbo plans a Birthday Party that is actually a farewell party, during which we discover that Bilbo has been lying to everyone about how he came by his magic ring — though Gandalf insists that he never believed a word of it (‘I heard Bilbo’s strange story of how he had “won” it, and I could not believe it. When I at last got the truth out of him, I saw at once that he had been trying to put his claim to the ring beyond doubt. Much like Gollum with his “birthday-present” The lies were too much alike for my comfort.’) We discover that Gollum is not that individual’s real name, for he’s actually called Sméagol. Frodo travels under the pseudonym ‘Mr Underhill’, in which name he books into The Prancing Pony. Here he and the other hobbits are met by a dangerous-looking and mysterious man called Strider, who is actually called Dúnadan, although he’s actually-actually called Aragorn. Much of chapter 10 is given over to the hobbits suspicion of this hooded, hidden figure (‘a strange-looking weather-beaten man … A travel-stained cloak of heavy dark-green cloth was drawn close about him, and in spite of the heat of the room he wore a hood that overshadowed his face; but the gleam of his eyes could be seen as he watched the hobbits.’) It is not until Bilbo receives a letter from the absent Gandalf, confirming Strider as friend not foe, that the tension is relaxed. ‘Why didn’t you tell me that you were Gandalf’s friend at once?’ Frodo asks him. ‘It would have saved time.’ In reply Strider reveals that he was not sure that the hobbits might not have been Sauron’s agents in disguise:

“I had to study you first, and make sure of you. The Enemy has set traps for me before now. As soon as I had made up my mind, I was ready to tell you whatever you asked. But I must admit,” he added with a queer laugh, “that I hoped you would take to me for my own sake. A hunted man sometimes wearies of distrust and longs for friendship. But there, I believe my looks are against me.”

Appearance versus reality: Sauron looked fair, but was always wicked (his fair looks deceived the elves). Aragorn looks hard and dangerous and suspicious, but is good. A related pairing might be Saruman, who appears ‘white’ but is dark-hearted, and Gandalf, ‘grey’ but with the (as it were) whiter soul. The revelation of this ‘deception’ on behalf of Saruman ‘happens’ during the events of The Fellowship of the Ring although it really only plays-out in the novel later. And my point is that this element of The Ring Sets Out notably falls away in the second half of Fellowship, and throughout the rest of the novel. Is that odd? First book: fake house ruse, travelling under an alias, surrounded by people in disguise. Remaining five books: none of that. Say what?

The two ‘cut from adaptation’ elements flag this up, really: for they are at opposite ends of one another. Whatever you might say about Tom Bombadil he is in no way in disguise. He is entirely, egregiously himself: what you see is what you get, frank and open and direct, he hides nothing, he is. Insofar as the ring embodies this principle of disguise (for becoming invisible is another, very effective mode of disguise) it’s significant that the ring has absolutely not effect upon Tom— he puts it on and does not vanish, his blue eye gleams through the ring of it, and he hands it easily back to Frodo.

It seemed to grow larger as it lay for a moment on his big brown-skinned hand. Then suddenly he put it to his eye and laughed. For a second the hobbits had a vision, both comical and alarming, of his bright blue eye gleaming through a circle of gold. Then Tom put the Ring round the end of his little finger and held it up to the candlelight. For a moment the hobbits noticed nothing strange about this. Then they gasped. There was no sign of Tom disappearing!

But actually most characters in the novel are like this: the good characters are manifestly good — unless, like Boromir, they fall under the spell of the ring, and even then they start immediately and obviously to manifest dubious behaviour — and the wicked characters are manifestly wicked. The exception is Gollum, although in the later books Tolkien gives us not a wicked character cunningly disguising themselves as a good one, but a split personality, a creature painfully battling within himself. When he calls Frodo ‘master’ Gollum is being genuine; and when he calls the Ring master he is being genuine too — that’s the whole point.

Why, then, does the novel start off with all this business with disguise, misdirection and subterfuge? And why does it then drop all that?

Well, one answer to the first question would be: Tolkien is ‘doing’ Scott. Disguise, after all, is a central way in which Scott construes his heroic-romantic historical novels. Scott’s characters are constantly gadding about in disguise, especially kings and princes (kings and princes almost always first appear in disguise in a Scott novel), with the revealing of the true identity being offered to the reader as a coup de théâtre. Actually, after you’ve read a couple of Scotts, mind, it becomes easy to spot who’s behind the manifestly disguised characters, but that hardly spoils the textual ruse. I think Tolkien starts his novel in this, broadly Scottian mode. After all, one of the big throughlines of The Lord of the Rings is that Aragorn is literally a king in disguise: lurking about with his hood hiding his face, going by ‘Strider’ (Tolkien initially resisted Rayner Unwin’s suggestion for the title of vol 3, The Return of the King, because he worried it was what modern parlance calls ‘a spoiler’, though he did eventually agree).

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I’ll say a little more about Scott, for I consider him a vital influence on Tolkien, although one that is rarely noted. There’s a reason for this, I think: critics interested in Tolkien’s inspirations, of whom there are many, tend to focus on matters of content. There’s no doubt that Bilbo’s thieving encounter with the gold-hoarding dragon is modelled on Beowulf, say — or that he took dwarf and wizard names from the Elder Eddar, or other story-elements from northern folk-tales and Märchen, or that the magic ring is adopted from the story of Gyges, or from Wagner (though JRRT got cross when the similarities were pointed out). This is all very well and good and I do not quarrel with it. But there are more and more important things to a novel that content. Let’s talk of style and form for a moment. One of the notable things about The Lord of the Rings is its formal blend of the discursive forms of the 19th-century novel and older, archaic styles and idioms, the latter becoming more prominent a feature of the text as the novel goes on (the path from ‘“Lawks!” said Merry’ in Book 1, to “Didst thou think that the eyes of the White Tower were blind? Nay, I have seen more than thou knowest” in Book 6). But we can say more: it’s not ‘the 19th-century novel’ in general; the main stylistic and formal influence was the particular prolix, digressive, antiquarian style of Scott’s historical novels.

During my recent re-read of all the Waverley novels I found myself repeatedly reminded of Tolkien’s big book: the discursive style, the inset ballads and poems, the way a texture of lived-experience is generated through specific details and a quasi-antiquarian commentary upon those details, but most of all the central shape — a middling character who leaves his comfortable home, motivated by an imaginative curiosity about more romantic, older modes of life or prompted by the forces of history, and who gets caught up in the Great Events of the Day, which turn out to be the hinge upon which History itself turns. The narrative in both Scott and Tolkien is a there-and-back-again journey, through a landscape peopled with various different tribes (in Scott: English, Borderers, Lowland Scots, Highlanders) and different idioms and, in some cases, languages; the descriptions of mountains and battles, above all the elegiac sense of an old world passing away. But of course the Lord of the Rings is Scott-like, since Tolkien grew up reading Scott as did all from his class and generation.

In fact, I argue that Tolkien took not just a broader textual approach from Scott (and from authors who followed Scott and were themselves influenced by his style), but specific details as well: it seems to me that Tolkien’s ‘Black Riders’ are versions of, and take their imaginative origins from, the terrifying schwarz-reiters of Quentin Durward; and that much of the ‘Crossing Caradhras’ episode in Book 2 draws on the very similar episode in Anne of Geierstein. But this is to revert to looking for similarities of content. Let’s stick with form and style, and think a little about the underlying textual logic.

One entail to all this is that we can, I think, regard ‘the Fantasy novel’ as a particular kind of Historical Fiction, one in which the history is made-up, worldbuilt (elaborated in detail and at length in Tolkien’s appendices) but which is deployed in the same ways Scott deploys his history.

Lukács’s still-essential study, The Historical Novel (1937 in Russian, 1962 in English translation) takes Walter Scott as the paradigmatic historical novelist, not because he was the first person to write a historical novel (he wasn’t), nor because he was in his day very popular and influential (he was, but that’s not what interests Lukács). Rather he identifies in Scott’s Waverley novels a dramatisation of the dynamic of history as such.

The typical Scott novel goes like this: there’s a protagonist not in himself notable or important, a (fictional) individual living at a time of (historical) flux, and he meets various real historical characters in the course of his peregrinations. Generally this individual — let’s call him Waverley, after the protagonist of Scott’s first and series-naming novel — is torn between supporting the old and supporting the new. The old is the romantic, thrilling, charismatic but outmoded and unviable past; the new is the practical, bourgeois, in many ways unappealing but viable and inevitable present-future. In Waverley this dyad is: the romantic, doomed Jacobites on the one hand and the Hanoverian succession, which is the future, on the other. Waverley ‘wavers’ between the two, hence his name: drawn first to the cause of Bonnie Prince Charlie, he ends the novel a respectable Hanoverian-supporting laird. And, with variations and tweaks, that’s the basic Scott paradigm for all his novels.

What Lukács thinks important about this is that Scott (though writing decades before Marx) intuitively grasped that history is a dialectical process by which older social-cultural theses come into conflict with antithetical present-day forces and are sublated into a synthetic future. That, in other words, Scott is writing about the dynamic of history itself, and his stories and characters are there to illustrate that dynamic. Scott’s historical periods are always in flux, always illustrative of process, rather than being static period backdrops. ‘Through the plot of the historical novel,’ says Lukács, ‘at whose centre stands the hero, a neutral ground is sought and found upon which the extreme, opposing social forces can be brought into a human relation with one another.’ Where Shakespeare’s histories (say) focus on figures of world-historical importance like kings and caesars, Scott’s protagonists are ordinary people, removed from the centres of historical power.

In Scott’s novels, the big names of history ‘can never be central figures of the action. The important leading figure, who embodies an historical movement, necessarily does so at a certain level of abstraction. Scott, by first showing the complex and involved character of popular life itself, creates this being which the leading figure then has to generalize and concentrate in an historical deed.’ Accordingly ‘the struggles and antagonisms of history are best represented by “mediocre” heroes who, in their psychology and destiny, always represent social trends and historical forces.’ In this context, ‘it matters little whether individual details, individual facts are historically correct or not … Detail is only a means of achieving historical faithfulness, for making concretely clear the historical necessity of a concrete situation.’ At the same, time, Lukács insists that historical fiction written entirely ‘from below’, dealing only with proletarian experience without any middle class or aristocratic characters, cannot capture the totality of historical experience as such. And here we are. Indeed, arguably contemporary Tolkienian (and post-Tolkienian) Fantasy are more expressive of the Lukacsian dialectic than Scott himself, since the whole premise of Fantasy — or so I am going to argue — is in a complicated desire to return to an enchanted past, in a world that has been so comprehensibly disenchanted by modernity (by science, by capitalism, by Protestantism: see Weber, Charles Taylor etc.) Fantasy is in deeper love with this pre-modern past even than was Scott, and yet Fantasy can see how unviable this feudal, warrior, hierarchical shame-culture is in actuality.

One more thing to say about the form Lord of the Rings takes: its famously (or infamously) slow opening. ‘Make your opening hooky,’ yell the teachers of creative writing. ‘If the opening page of your story doesn’t grab your reader, no publisher will buy it, no reader persevere with it!’ As one of the world’s best-selling novels, Lord of the Rings stands as a splendid falsification of this injunction, for it starts with extraordinary leisureliness.

The leisurely opening is also a Scott tactic, of course. Michael Innes’s novel The Secret Vanguard (1940) — Innes being the pseudonym under which academic J. I. M. Stewart wrote crime fiction — opens with the protagonist, Sheila Grant on a train to Scotland. She has with her a copy of Scott’s Antiquary which she starts to read. This is how Scott’s novel opens:

It was early on a fine summer’s day, near the end of the eighteenth century, when a young man, of genteel appearance, journeying towards the north-east of Scotland, provided himself with a ticket in one of those public carriages which travel between Edinburgh and the Queensferry, at which place, as the name implies, and as is well known to all my northern readers, there is a passage-boat for crossing the Firth of Forth. The coach was calculated to carry six regular passengers, besides such interlopers as the coachman could pick up by the way, and intrude upon those who were legally in possession. The tickets, which conferred right to a seat in this vehicle, of little ease, were dispensed by a sharp-looking old dame, with a pair of spectacles on a very thin nose, who inhabited a “laigh shop,” anglice, a cellar, opening to the High Street by a straight and steep stair, at the bottom of which she sold tape, thread, needles, skeins of worsted, coarse linen cloth, and such feminine gear, to those who had the courage and skill to descend to the profundity of her dwelling, without falling headlong themselves, or throwing down any of the numerous articles which, piled on each side of the descent, indicated the profession of the trader below. [Walter Scott, Antiquary ch.1]

… and so on. Innes’ protagonist summarises the story to herself: ‘an ever-so-mildly interesting young man in an ever-so-mildly interesting situation’, adding: ‘nice to be Sir Walter Scott and able to open a tale of romantic adventure with that leisurely, confident, book-wormy prose. Nice that readers stood for it.’ [Innes, Secret Vanguard, ch 4] This looks like Innes, as a writer, expressing a kind of amused annoyance that readers nowadays are less indulgent, more demanding; but Grant also says: ‘nice that one could feel oneself as a reader standing for it today. It was Sir Walter’s confidence that got one.’ She is right, too, although the case is less convincing now than once it was. Although perhaps Fantasy, influenced by Tolkien’s mode, is one portion of contemporary writing where this is still true. It takes ages before Memory, Sorrow and Thorn, or Wheel of Time, or The Kingkiller Chronicle get going, after all.

Like Sheila, I say: ‘nice to be John Ronald Reuel and able to open a tale of romantic adventure with that leisurely, confident, book-wormy prose. Nice that readers stand for it.’

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I want to say a little more about ‘disguise’ in The Ring Sets Out. Frodo disguising himself as ‘Mr Underhill’; the whole Crickhollow house misdirection; Bilbo hiding the true origins of the ring and the true purpose of his birthday party from everyone; Strider in his cloak and hood, glowering threateningly at the hobbits. Disguise and narrative misdirection are, as I say, prominent features of Scott’s storytelling. In this old blog I suggest that it’s actually Scott’s way of doing what Jane Austen does much more subtly and effectively with her irony:

In The Talisman (1825) noble characters are constantly gadding about in disguise. Prince David of Scotland goes disguised as a slave. When King Richard falls sick he is attended, and healed, by an Arab physician called El Hakim. At the end of the novel we discover that this physician was actually Sultan Saladin himself, Richard’s enemy, all along. All this disguise gubbins is Scott’s way of intimating that a character like Saladin might be both the enemy of Christendom and an honourable, gallant individual at the same time. It’s a device that externalises what happens more naturally, and more persuasively, as interiorised characterisation in Austen’s novels.

One thing we might say is that this has something to do with ‘modernity’. Of course, Scott didn’t invent the disguise-plot: that’s ancient — Achilles amongst the women, Odysseus calling himself ‘Nobody’, Aristophanes’s Thesmaphorizusae. Or to take an example more directly relevant to Tolkien: Shakespeare (we know that Tolkien’s idea for the Ents was rooted in his disappointment that the moving forest in Macbeth was just marching soldiers holding twigs; and Eowyn’s ‘I am no man!’ dispatching of the Nazgûl is a version of Macduff’s reveal during his boss-fight with Macbeth).

Shakespeare often has characters come on stage in disguise, as the Duke departs Vienna and returns disguised as Friar Ludovico in Measure for Measure; or Kent, banished by King Lear, comes back on stage disguised as Caius. More famous, and more widely discussed, are the many instances of cross-dressing in the comedies: Viola in Twelfth Night, Rosalind in As You Like It, Portia in The Merchant of Venice. This is saying something about sexual desire and gender-identity, but it’s also saying something about theatre itself, about acting: dressing up, disguising yourself — every schoolkid loves to point out that the actor playing Viola in Twelfth Night was, in Shakespeare’s day, a boy dressing up as a girl dressing up as a boy. This is also about modesty, pudeur, social conventions around sexuality and display: it was considered immodest for a woman to act upon the stage, a kind of prostitution. We are less hidebound about these things nowadays, but the strange tangle of performance, disguise, desire and shame still construes the profession: film stars are more beautiful than ordinary people, loci of projected desire and yearning, not despite but because they are not who they present as being. Because they are in disguise in plain view, as it were.

Modernity’s ‘disguising’ has something to do with the shift from a shame-culture to a guilt-culture. In the former, ethics depends upon outwardness — everyone knows that Orestes is guilty of the murder of his mother, and his atonement is performed in public, where everyone can see. Nowadays though, motivated by guilt rather than shame, there is a disjunction between what’s happening inside us and the face we put on (that we keep in a jar by the door) when we go out into the world. Raskolnikov is no Orestes. Our social being as such becomes, as it were, a disguise, hiding the inner reality. For Freud this is a simple description of humanity, over and above questions of crime and punishment. Alongside this, though, is a distinctly modern focus on being to thine own self true — on authenticity, which is really about individuality (and therefore atomisation). John Bayley has this to say about the sexual-disguise and the importance of ‘individuality’

The only time L.P. Hartley met E.M. Forster they did not get on. Too much politeness, and mutual wariness. And what a comedy in contrasting physiques: Forster sharp, quizzical and birdlike; Hartley plump, vacant, moustached and apologetic, half walrus and half melting snowman, pipe in mouth. But underneath they had a great deal in common, and chiefly the mysterious, almost unconscious knowledge of their own powers as natural artists. They knew how to put themselves and what they wanted to say into an artifice that would enhance and dramatise by disguise, to the point where disguise itself became the object of art. Homosexuality may have been at the core of this knowledge, but more important was the instinct to personalise sexuality, so that it referred to themselves alone, a pure individualness in which the disguises of art could rejoice and revel, displaying themselves in their own way and in their on tongue.

Hartley, about whom Bayley is writing here, ‘loved the past, hated the present and dreaded the future’. So did Tolkien. And although it is a routine criticism of Lord of the Rings that it deals only in ‘types’, not in modern characters (the only character in the novel, in the modern sense of the term, is Gollum: as Brian Aldiss once said to me), we can also note that these ‘types’ are all vigorous, memorable and distinct individuals. This is less of a paradox than we might think. Bayley goes on:

Oblomov reproved his friends for comparing him with Other People. It is fatal to this kind of art to be standardised critically in terms of other people and their conventional problems. To assert, as Adrian Wright continually does, that familiar traumas and ‘terrible truths’ lie under it collapses art into convention, and indeed into banality. Shorn of the disguise that is itself, the allurements and the personality of its humours, it can look no more than a formula for a standard type of ‘powerful’ story, the kind that any creative writing course can teach you. Terrible truths are two a penny in fiction: what is needed is the art to deconventionalise them, to transform them into the personal, the really intriguing and engaging case.

Probably the worst thing that has happened to the fiction of our time is that it has lost the naturalness of a once necessary disguise, and has no way of recovering it. The absence of any social censorship and the imperative of ‘absolute honesty’ alike see to that. Wuthering Heights (Hartley’s favourite novel), A Passage to India, The Go-Between not only belong to the foreignness of the novel’s past — they seem to cling to it. Without the disguises that reveal the individual as in art he really is and can be, the novel, or to be more precise certain kinds of novel, would be quite lost.

Tolkien is not writing a Wuthering Heights or Passage to India-type novel (‘Weathertop Heights’ ‘A Passage to Mordor’). He has no problem with social censorship and is uninterested in ‘absolute honesty’ of the personal, confessional sense. Like Hartley he loved the past, hated the present and dreaded the future (except, in that last case, as a Catholic, he trusted to divine providence to bring something eucatastrophic out of the way the world was going — or declining). But he set himself to write a novel, and so Scott, with his deep love for disguise, becomes his way of reaching back to the pre-modernity that Scott loved and represented. It looks a little strange to call Tolkien a dialectical writer, but there’s an important sense in which he is.

Although, that said, the disguise element drops away. When the fellowship meet a Balrog, it is not anything else disguised, it’s just a Balrog. When they meet Galadriel she is simply Galadriel. Tempted by Frodo’s ingenuous offer of the ring to try on some other identity, she resists the temptation saying: ‘“I pass the test”, she said. “I will diminish, and go into the West and remain Galadriel.”’ Remain Galadriel. She is who she is, and so is everyone else the hobbits meet on the far side of the Misty Mountains.

One way of putting this would be to say that disguise is the index of privacy, and the ability to have a private life is something the characters lose as they leave the Shire. In a different essay (this one on Russian Literature) Bayley locates the greatness in Chekov’s ‘Lady with a Lapdog’ story in precisely this:

The inwardness of this story, its ‘moral’, is that the secret life is what is really precious to a person; that he may never discover one, but if he does make the discovery — through falling in love for example — the visible part of his life, and other people’s lives, will seem intolerably dull, meaningless, and humdrum. This moral, we might note, is both dubious and romantic, conceited and woolly minded: exactly the moral we might expect to be drawn by a man who has fallen in love. That directness, and that dubiousness, are precisely what the story is able to make into its total success. Gurov, the hero in love, perceives what the story also perceives, but the story perceives it with a difference. [John Bayley, Selected Essays (CUP 1984), 170]

Bayley then quotes from Chekov’s story: ‘Judging others by himself, he did not believe what he saw, and always fancied that every man led his real, most interesting life under cover of secrecy as under cover of night. The personal life of every individual is based on secrecy and perhaps it is partly for that reason that civilized man is so nervously anxious that personal privacy should be respected.’

Bayley never wrote about Tolkien, I’m sorry to say (not his thing at all, I suppose). Everything in Tolkien is premised on the exact opposite of this: secrecy, embodied most centrally by the literal invisibility conveyed by the evil Ring, is entirely at odds with social and personal good. It is in Tolkien’s world a moment of profound triumph that Galadriel can win that battle against herself and remain Galadriel.

This only makes it odder than the first of the six ‘books’ of Lord of the Rings is so concerned with disguise, misdirection and secrecy. Perhaps Tolkien is making a tacit point here about the triviality of Hobbit-life and the Shire? This play at dressing-up is childish, and leaving the Shire for the larger world, in a bildungsroman-y sense, is about growing up into a profounder straightforwardness about who you are. I’m not sure. There’s a quotation from Elias Canetti I sometimes think of: from his study of Franz Kafka, Kafka’s Other Trial. According to Canetti, Kafka ‘did not have for his private and interior processes that disregard which distinguishes insignificant writers from writers of imagination.’ According to Canetti ‘a person who thinks that he is empowered to separate his inner world from the outer one has no inner world from which something might be separable.’ The older I get, the more I come to think this is a profound truth.

Anyway: on to Book 2, ‘The Ring Goes South’.