Tolkien, Race, and Cultural History: From Fairies to Hobbits by Dimitra Fimi (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 563 Tolkien, Race, and Cultural History: From Fairies to Hobbits. By Dimitra Fimi. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. ISBN: 978-0-230-21951-9. Pp. xvi + 240. $85.00. Dmitra Fimi's Tolkien, Race, and Cultural History is a strong addition to the growing field of Tolkien studies. Based on her doctoral dissertation, it has some residual qualities that can detract: a need early on to defend its method ofcriticism, transitional chapters that add little to the overall argument, and rather pedestrian statements ofwhat will be proven in each section. Nevertheless, the work as a whole is rich in background and has the grace to avoid too much theoretical jargon. After an introductory chapter, she divides her investigation into three parts: Tolkien's early corpus in relation to Victorian and Edwardian fairies; the philologist's invented languages in relation to early twentieth-century views of linguistics, phonetics, and universal languages; and his invented world in relation to nineteenth- and twentieth-century expressions of history, race, and material culture. What holds this collection of topics together is the book's stress on the cultural and social context that shaped and resisted Tolkiens own literary creation. Part I (chapters 2 to 4) primarily examines Tolkien's youthful poetry and his The Book of the Lost Tales, as well as the first Sketch of the Mythology. In her introduction, Fimi observes that in the course of his career Tolkien moved from a "mythological mode" to a novelistic (or historical) one, or from a "Victorian Tolkien beginning [to] a modern end" (5-6). This thesis guides her study of the Victorian and Edwardian love affair with fairies and its impact on Tolkien's earliest writings. Fimi explores an area charted by John Garth's 2003 work, Tolkien and the Great War, examining how Tolkiens early views of fairies (i.e. elves) shifted from the diminutive and delicate creatures of the Victorian imagination to the immortal and powerful beings of his developed mythology. By closely studying each of the earliest poems and the first versions of what would become the Silmarillion, she identifies the transitional stages that continue even into The Hobbit and thus shows that Tolkiens own conception was an evolving process rather than a sudden change in literary taste. In turn, Fimli traces in chapter 3 the potential impact of Victorian fairy plays and offashionable paintings on the Tolkien of the 191Os,showing that the author had a place for flower-fairies in his early Quenya Lexicon. In similar fashion, she establishes the influence of the play Peter Pan on Tolkiens early "Cottage of Lost Play" and its place in The Book of Lost Tales. Just as children are drawn by Peter to Neverland, so children in the realm of the elves are given the task of comforting the bereft in their dreams. Fimli treats in chapter 4 the moral mission of the TCBS, Tolkiens circle of friends at King Edward's, as well as the young writer's desire to create what has been called "a mythology for Angles-Saxon England:' lhese topics are less ground-breaking, mostly bringing together insights from Garth, 564 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE Verlyn Flieger, Michael Drout, and Tom Shippey; however, she does uncover some surprising insights, such as how at one point, gnomes and goblins were briefly associated in Tolkiens mind and how the Englishness of fairies was important to him in the earliest stages of his mythology. Part II of Tolkien, Race, and Cultural History is the least developed of the three sections and, consequently, the weakest. Part II addresses two broad concerns: 1) Tolkiens beliefs concerning the genetic and symbolist nature of language, and 2) the influence of universal, artificial languages and phonetic alphabets on Tolkien's own invented languages. To examine the former, in chapter 6 Fimi looks closely at Tolkien's essays A Secret Vice (1931) and English and Welsh (1955). Tolkien conjectured that a person's aesthetic preference for the sounds of certain languages might have its origins in genetic heritage. Clearly uncomfortable with such an idea, Fimi makes an effort to relocate Tolkiens linguistic preferences in certain ideological and nationalist notions. For example, she speculates that Tolkien found Gothic...