Laughter in Middle-earth: Humour in and around the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien eds. Thomas Honegger and Maureen F. Mann (review)

Humor in Tolkien's work is a vexing subject, particularly to those who think there isn't any. While his negative critics will allow that his work contains "some whimsical jokes" (Moorcock 107), even the more positive observers frequently comment, with overtones of disapproval, on Tolkien's lack of the pervasive irony of Modernist literature (for examples, see Curry 379–80). All that this means, of course, is that Tolkien is not a canonical Modernist writer; and, as Patrick Curry notes, while Tolkien is never ironic about his fiction, which is what Modernism expects its irony to be, "ironies abound within The Lord of the Rings, of course, not least that it turns out to be not Frodo or Sam who finally destroy the Ring, nor any of the great and good, but Gollum" (380), a point also made by other scholars and also about other instances than that (Éowyn slaying the Lord of the Nazgûl, for another most obvious example; see, e.g., Enright 131). As for the "whimsical jokes," no subject is more de gustibus than jokes; even Tolkien himself, who delighted in the narrative humor of E. A. Wyke-Smith's The Marvellous Land of Snergs, later had second thoughts about reproducing so much of it in The Hobbit.

None of this contentious critical debate, and nothing about whether the internal ironies of The Lord of the Rings count as humor or even if they count as irony, makes it into Walking Tree's anthology of articles on "humour in and around the works of J.R.R. Tolkien." Where a previous Walking Tree anthology, on Tolkien and Philosophy, opened with an impressive 12-page editorial introduction scouring the Tolkien critical bibliography for 62 relevant past titles (Arduini and Testi 9–20), the present book makes no attempt to consider past scholarly discussion of Tolkien's humor—there has been some—nor do the individual articles cite much of it. Instead, this book begins with a perfunctory five-page foreword by Tom Shippey, who calls Sam's final words in The Lord of the Rings, "Well, I'm back," a "non-committal and even pointless remark" (1). Has Shippey forgotten the book he's discussing? Frodo had told Sam to ask Rose "if she can spare you" for a short trip: "Tell Rose that you won't be away very long, not more than a fortnight" (RK, VI, ix, 306). And now he's back, just as he'd said he'd be. It's just that, while he was taking this insignificant vacation, he witnessed the unexpected (to him) departure of Frodo—not to mention Bilbo, Gandalf, Galadriel, and Elrond—oversea, and the End of the Third Age before his very eyes, that's all. So his final line is another Tolkienian internal irony, for those with the wit to observe it.

Shippey's foreword actually concerns laughter more than it does humor. This intensifies a suspicion first aroused in this reader by the book's title, Laughter in Middle-earth, that the two are not the same thing. This is fully justified by the essays by Alastair Whyte and Jennifer Raimundo. These both discuss the corpus of instances of Tolkien's characters laughing, which they do not do necessarily because anything is humorous even to them, let alone to the reader. Whyte begins uninvitingly with a theory of laughter, and through examples in The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings reaches the conclusion that, in Tolkien, laughter is a signifier of the relationship between good and evil. Good characters laugh to show that evil has no power over them, and evil characters laugh to show confidence in their power over good, confidence which, Whyte notes, is invariably mistaken (54). Raimundo begins by addressing humor, even briefly...