Tolkien’s Intellectual Landscape by E.L. Risden (review)

The title of this book is a bit deceiving. If one were to ask Professor Tolkien to define his ‘intellectual landscape,’ his reply would likely to have consisted of descriptions of dark moors, vast and cold northern plains, rolling English countryside, and the bards and monsters and doomed heroes that occupied them. This book is only tangentially occupied with the medieval languages and tales that dominate both Tolkien’s academic work and his fiction.

But, rather than producing yet another study of Beowulf’s influences on Middle-earth, E.L. Risden sets out to show us a twentieth-century novelist who shared much common ground with his more critically acclaimed contemporaries, writers like Joseph Conrad, T.S. Eliot, and James Joyce. Whereas these authors have received much academic attention as writers of canonical Modernist fiction, Tolkien has mostly been ridiculed, dismissed, or ignored. Risden explains here why this response has been a mistake.

The book begins with a chapter assessing Tolkien’s published scholarship (translation, philological studies, criticism) and his narrative style. The latter, Risden observes, owes a great debt to the former. ‘No better criticism exists,’ he states, ‘than the creation of one’s own art in response to that of another’ (40). In Tolkien’s narrative style Risden finds experimentation—classical mimesis, linear realism, and ‘elements of the Gothic’ like chiaroscuro, ‘loops,’ and fractals—as well as similar shifts in language and tone, ‘from humorous to grim, high to low, elaborate to simple’ (66).

The succeeding chapters pair a major theme in Tolkien’s fiction with a parallel Modernist author or theorist: Middle-earth quests with those in Conrad and Freud, Tolkien’s desolate landscapes with Eliot’s Waste Land, Tolkien’s monsters vs. ‘the monstrous body,’ Tolkien’s Westernesse with Said’s Orientalism, even Tolkien’s ideas about leaders in opposition to modern management leadership theory. Lastly, the book concludes with Risden discussing Tolkien’s mythopoesis and the pedagogical risks and benefits of teaching Tolkien at the collegiate level.

The path that Risden has chosen in this study is a difficult one. While much of Tolkien studies has tended toward source-criticism, written by medievalists trained in understanding the sources Tolkien read and taught, Risden (also a scholar of medieval and Renaissance literature) has chosen to discuss authors and works that Tolkien almost certainly did not read, and most certainly did not like. Tolkien, for example, seems to have shared C.S. Lewis’ dismissals of the ‘Bloomsberries’ (as Tom Shippey calls the Bloomsbury Group) and the Sonnenkinder, while reading even less twentieth-century literature than did Lewis. Risden does not see this as a serious obstacle, for writers like Conrad and Eliot ‘formed part of the consciousness of the time, and anyone writing in the intellectual milieu could hardly have avoided their work and thought’ (67). But while Lewis did attack the zeitgeist of the Post-Christian Age in many of his works, Tolkien did his best to simply ignore it. War and industrialism certainly threatened Tolkien’s Shire, but he mostly shut his door on the Culture Wars. Though he may have been an isolationist old hobbit like Gaffer Gamgee, the current generation of Tolkien scholars are more hobbits of the Merry and Pippin stripe, ready and willing to defend their intellectual territory. Here stands Risden: ‘Tolkien’s work draws attacks also, I suspect, because those who think themselves above it fear its lack of sexual-identity questions, existential angst, and self obsession … Perhaps in lack of self-referentiality alone it diverges from its twentieth-century environment, an age often governed by self-promotion and navel-gazing’ (16).

Risden’s book elevates the critical discourse on Tolkien’s fiction at many points, even if, like the narrative of The Lord of the Rings, it is an uneven and curvilinear journey. Still, it is a journey well worth attempting.