Super Natural Supernatural: Tolkien as Realist

Super Natural Supernatural« Tolkien as Realist The more J. R. R. Tolkien's "Middle-earth" gets hailed as the finest of English fantasies — "the most original and varied creation ever seen in the genre"1 — the more Middle-earth gets called "an incredible sphere," "a never-never world," a literary location without "any trace of concrete reality,"2 the more Middle-earth seems to me down home. I propose that the world's greatest fantasist is essentially a realist. I propose, as I think Tolkien proposes, that Middle-earth is a long way from Narnia, light worlds away from Oz. Middle-earth is as in-the-middle-of-things immediate and more middle-of-the-road typical than Egdon Heath or Yoknapatawpha County. Middleearth is a world where fantasy is founded in fact, where fiction comes perilously and provocatively close to life. The supernatural elements of Middle-earth are rooted deep in the natural. Middle-earth's every aspect, its idiosyncratic topography and weather, its alien peoples and institutions, its innovative number systems and calendars and alphabets and languages, and its fantastic fauna and flora, is grounded in the familiar. Weather results invariably from unobtrusive but discernible meteorological cause. Tolkien never goes out of his narrative way to tell the time of his tale, yet seasonal sequences of diurnal light patterns and even lunar cycles can be traced from incidental hints in the story. Third Age languages are so practically down-to-earth that modern mortals write letters in them. Thus there is throughout Tolkien's fictional universe "always a feeling of Present-earth. "3 Middle-earth, its "fantasy based on hard fact," proves reliable with an earthiness which constantly stimulates readers to crossreference to their own versions of reality. A typical touch of that earthing of Middle-earth underlies The Lord of the Rings 'climactic Mt. Doom episode. The mountain, though the narrative makes no more than assonant issue of it, is clearly a dormant volcano» "a huge mass of ash and slag and burned stone, out of which a sheersided cone was raised into the clouds." As we approach with Frodo and Sam and the Ring, submerged and incidental geological intimations of volcanic activity growl out of thé mountain in onomatopoeic rumblings of prose — "a deep remote rumble as of thunder imprisoned under the earth." Later, the mountain "smokes"; then there is "a brief red flame that flickered under the clouds and died away." After a preparatory "roar and a great confusion of noise" in which "fires leaped up and licked the roof" and "the throbbing grew to a great tumult, and the Mountain shook," Mt. Doom erupts» Then all passed. Towers fell and mountains slid; walls crumbled and melted, crashing down, vast spires of smoke and spouting steams went billowing up, up, until they toppled like an overwhelming wave and its wild crest curled and came foaming down upon the land. Then at last over the miles between there came a rumble, rising to a deafening crash and roar; the earth shook, the plain heaved and cracked, and Orodruin reeled. Fire belched from its riven summit. The skies burst into thunder seared with lightning. Down like lashing whips fell a torrent of black rain. A few pages later a "huge fiery vomit" rolls in "slow thunderous cascade down the eastern mountain-side," and later, still in precise geological sequence, falls "a rain of hot ash" (III, p. 215-228). Despite that journalistic reportage, the reader comes away from the chapter having witnessed not the eruption of a volcano but the chaotic End of the Third Age triggered by Gollum's fall into the Cracks of Doom with the One Ring. The volcano is incidental , indeed submerged in the narrative; most readers are not consciously aware it is there. Developed unobtrusively throughout an entire chapter, this tangible volcanic eruption grounds ostensibly supernatural incident in downto -earth imagery. Middle-earth resonates with reality in part because its felt points of reference are earthy. Notwithstanding that kind of integrity in its total cosmological mosaic, Tolkien's fiction has been found seriously wanting in terms of piecemeal credibility. At intimate levels, critics see "bland and eyeless disregard of facts of life...