Tom Shippey > Quotes

“The cry that 'fantasy is escapist' compared to the novel is only an echo of the older cry that novels are 'escapist' compared with biography, and to both cries one should make the same answer: that freedom to invent outweighs loyalty to mere happenstance, the accidents of history; and good readers should know how to filter a general applicability from a particular story.”
― Tom Shippey, The Road to Middle-Earth: How J.R.R. Tolkien Created a New Mythology

“When people say that this kind of fantasy fiction is escapist and evading the real world, well I think that’s an evasion. It’s actually trying to confront something that most people would rather not confront.”
― Tom Shippey

“While persistence offers no guarantees, it does give 'luck' a chance to operate.”
― Tom Shippey, The Road to Middle-Earth: How J.R.R. Tolkien Created a New Mythology

“The dominant literary mode of the twentieth century has been the fantastic. This may appear a surprising claim, which would not have seemed even remotely
conceivable at the start of the century and which is bound to encounter fierce resistance even now. However, when the time comes to look back at the century, it seems very likely that future literary historians, detached from the squabbles of our present, will see as its most representative and distinctive works books like J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and also George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and The Inheritors, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat’s Cradle, Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot-49 and Gravity’s Rainbow. The list could readily be extended, back to the late nineteenth century with H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr Moreau and The War of the Worlds, and up to writers currently active like Stephen R. Donaldson and George R.R. Martin. It could take in authors as different, not to say opposed, as Kingsley and Martin Amis, Anthony Burgess, Stephen King, Terry Pratchett, Don DeLillo, and Julian Barnes. By the end of the century, even authors deeply committed to the realist novel have often found themselves unable to resist the gravitational pull of the fantastic as a literary mode.

This is not the same, one should note, as fantasy as a literary genre – of the authors listed above, only four besides Tolkien would find their works regularly placed on the ‘fantasy’ shelves of bookshops, and ‘the fantastic’ includes many genres besides fantasy: allegory and parable, fairy-tale, horror and science fiction, modern ghost-story and medieval romance. Nevertheless, the point remains.
Those authors of the twentieth century who have spoken most powerfully to and for their contemporaries have for some reason found it necessary to use the metaphoric mode of fantasy, to write about worlds and creatures which we know do not exist, whether Tolkien’s ‘Middle-earth’, Orwell’s ‘Ingsoc’, the remote islands of Golding and Wells, or the Martians and Tralfa-madorians who burst into peaceful English or American suburbia in Wells and Vonnegut. A ready explanation for this phenomenon is of course that it represents a kind of literary disease, whose sufferers – the millions of readers of fantasy – should be scorned, pitied, or rehabilitated back to correct and proper taste. Commonly the disease is said to be ‘escapism’: readers and writers of fantasy are fleeing from reality. The problem with this is that so many of the originators of the later twentieth-century fantastic mode, including all four of those first mentioned above (Tolkien, Orwell, Golding, Vonnegut) are combat veterans, present at or at least deeply involved in the most traumatically significant events of the century, such as the Battle of the Somme (Tolkien), the bombing of Dresden (Vonnegut), the rise and early victory of fascism (Orwell). Nor can anyone say that they turned their backs on these events. Rather, they had to find some way of communicating and commenting on them. It is strange that this had, for some reason, in so many cases to involve fantasy as well as realism, but that is what has happened.”
― Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

“For Tolkien’s taste there were too few dragons in ancient literature, indeed by his count only three – the Miðgarðsorm or ‘Worm of Middle-earth’ which was to destroy the god Thor at Ragnarök, the Norse Doomsday; the dragon which Beowulf fights and kills at the cost of his own life; and Fafnir, who is killed by the Norse hero Sigurd.”
― Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

“Why could Tolkien not be more like Sir Thomas Malory, asked [Edwin] Muir, in the third Observer review of those cited above, and give us heroes and heroines like Lancelot and Guinevere, who ' knew temptation, were sometimes unfaithful to their vows,' were engagingly marked by adulterous passion? But T.H. White had already considered that paradigm, was indeed rewriting it at the same time as Tolkien in The Once and Future King; and he had seen the core of Malory's work not in romantic vice but in the human urge to murder. In White the poisonous adder that provokes the last disastrous battle is no adder but a harmless grass-snake, and the flash of the sword which brings on the two armies is not natural self-defense but natural blood-lust, creating a continuum from cruelty to animals to world wars and holocausts. Malory has to be rewritten to encompass a new view of evil.”
― Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

“Muir’s complaint in the third review, the annoying one, was that the whole work was sub-adult in its painlessness: ‘The good boys, having fought a deadly battle, emerge at the end of it well, triumphant and happy, as boys would naturally expect to do.’ There is a simple reply to this, which is to say that Frodo at least does not end up well, or happy, and that he avoids any suggestion of triumph, seeming in the end incurably scarred, a ‘burnt-out case’. He is admittedly taken away to be healed of his wounds, like King Arthur, though that is not the way Muir put it. But there are other people, and creatures, and things, which cannot be taken away or healed. In fact it is much easier to make a case out for Tolkien as a pessimist than as a foolish or childish optimist; it is another of the qualities which mark him out from most of those who have imitated him.”
― Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

“It is a mistake just to blame everything on evil forces ‘out there’, the habit of xenophobes and popular journalists; just as much a mistake to luxuriate in self-analysis, the great skill of Tolkien’s contemporaries, the cosseted upper-class writers of the ‘modernist’ movement.”
― Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

“The Boethian view is this: there is no such thing as evil. What people identify as evil is only the absence of good.”
― Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

“Feeria è meglio della sensazione che non ci sia niente al di là dell'usato mondo di tutti i giorni”
― Tom Shippey, Leaf by Niggle

“The Two Towers especially, and the first part of The Return of the King, have a structure reminiscent on a large scale of ‘The Council of Elrond’ on a small one. The word that describes the structure is ‘interlace’. Tolkien certainly knew the word, for it has become a commonplace of Beowulf-criticism, but he may not have liked it much: it is associated also with the structure of French prose romance, in which he took little interest. However, Tolkien certainly also knew that the Icelandic word for a short story is a Þáttr, literally a thread. One could say that several Þættir, or threads, twisted round each other, make up a saga; and Gandalf comes close to saying something like that when he says to Théoden, ‘There are children in your land who, out of the twisted threads of story, could pick the answer to your question’ (my emphasis). Tolkien may have felt that there had been all along a native version of the French technique of entrelacement, even if we no longer know the native word for it. But word, or no word, he was going to do it.”
― Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

“Tolkien, then, was a philologist before he was a mythologist, and a mythologist, at least in intention, before he ever became a writer of fantasy fiction. His beliefs about language and about mythology were sometimes original and sometimes extreme, but never irrational, and he was able to express them perfectly clearly. In the end he decided to express them not through abstract argument, but by demonstration, and the success of the demonstration has gone a long way to showing that he did often have a point: especially in his belief, which I share, that a taste for philology, for the history of language in all its forms, names and place-names included, is much more widespread in the population at large than educators and arbiters of taste like to think. In his 1959 ‘Valedictory Address to the University of Oxford’ (reprinted in Essays, pp. 224-40), Tolkien concluded that the problem lay not with the philologists nor with those they taught but with what he called ‘misologists’ – haters of the word. There would be no harm in them if they simply concluded language study was not for them, out of dullness or ignorance. But what he felt, Tolkien said, was:

"grievance that certain professional persons should suppose their dullness and ignorance to be a human norm; and anger when they have sought to impose the limitation of their minds upon younger minds, dissuading those with philological curiosity from their bent, encouraging those without this interest to believe that their lack marked them as minds of a superior order."

Behind this grievance and this anger was, of course, failure and defeat. It is now very hard to pursue a course of philology of the kind Tolkien would have approved in any British or American university. The misologists won, in the academic world; as did the realists, the modernists, the post-modernists, the despisers of fantasy.
But they lost outside the academic world. It is not long since I heard the commissioning editor of a major publishing house say, ‘Only fantasy is mass-market. Everything else is cult-fiction.’ (Reflective pause.) ‘That includes main-stream.’ He was defending his own buying strategy, and doubtless exaggerating, but there is a good deal of hard evidence to support him. Tolkien cried out to be heard, and we have still to find out what he was saying. There should be no doubt, though, that he found listeners, and that they found whatever he was saying worth their while.”
― Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

“Most of what has been said in the last two chapters has stressed Tolkien’s background in ancient literature. From it one could argue that The Lord of the Rings is essentially an ‘antiquarian’ work, a word now usually used rather patronizingly. The patronage is false, if the antiquarianism is true, and the latter quality does explain a great deal about the charm of Middle-earth. Nevertheless it does not explain why so many readers have found The Lord of the Rings so deeply influential, so readily applicable to their own circumstances. Tolkien’s work is not just an antiquarian fantasy. If it is still being read (like Beowulf) a thousand years after its creation, no perceptive person even in the far future could take it for anything other than a work, a highly characteristic work, of the twentieth century.”
― Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

“Tolkien could at any time, and without trying, have rewritten any of his supposedly archaic passages either in really archaic language, in Middle English or Old English, or in completely normal demotic contemporary slang.”
― Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

“Not much has been said by critics about the structure of The Lord of the Rings, but it is considerably more complex and at least as carefully-integrated as the multiple narrative of Joseph Conrad, for instance, in Nostromo. One might feel that a more experienced writer, one who wrote novels or fantasies professionally rather than passionately, would have known not to risk such finesses or trust so much to the ingenuity of his readers: but Tolkien knew no better than to try it.
The main effect of his interlacing technique, however, does not lie in surprise and suspense. What it does is to create a profound sense of reality, of that being the way things are. There is a pattern in Tolkien’s story, but his characters can never see it (naturally, because they are in it). To them the whole story seems chaotic, haunted by bad luck; they are lost in a wilderness metaphorically as well as cartographically, indeed in a ‘bewilderment’, sometimes in the dark, sometimes in an enchanted wood, frequently guessing wrong as to the meaning of what happens even to them.”
― Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

“The speaker makes himself a mantle, a wand, a flag and a crown, and names himself ‘king of this land’, calling on the inhabitants to show themselves. Immediately the cloud comes, the country is disenchanted, becomes a land of beetles, spiders and puffballs, the speaker realizes he is old, ‘years were heavy upon my back’. The boat brings him back, he has nothing, and even the shell is now ‘silent and dead’, without even an echo.”
― Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

“The argument that fantasy is intrinsically less truthful than realistic fiction could be extended to say that realistic fiction is intrinsically less truthful than biography. But we all (now) know that fiction allows a writer to express something, perhaps metaphorically or by analogy, which could not be expressed by history. The same argument should be extended to fantasy. That is surely why so many writers of the twentieth century, including the ones most closely concerned with real-world events, have had to write in the fantastic mode.”
― Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

“One of the differences between applicability and allegory, between myth and legend, must be that myth and applicability are timeless, allegory and legend time-constrained. The difference of course is not an absolute one, and a story can have elements of both at the same time: Saruman, and the Master of Laketown, are both examples of something which one can recognize as having a timeless quality, likely to reappear among human beings in any Age of the world, and which one can readily apply to modern times in particular. This does not mean that they stop having roles in a single, one-moment-in-time story, and it would be unfortunate if they did, for they would fade away to becoming mere labelled abstractions. Fortunately there are, scattered through The Lord of the Rings, demonstrations of Tolkien’s attitude to individual time and to mythic timelessness. They are often related to a subject not yet discussed with relation to either The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings, but of major importance to both, and to Tolkien: Tolkien’s poetry.”
― Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

“I argue that his continuing appeal rests not on mere charm or strangeness (though both are there and can again to some extent be explained), but on a deeply serious response to what will be seen in the end as the major issues of his century: the origin and nature of evil (an eternal issue, but one in Tolkien’s lifetime terribly re-focused); human existence in Middle-earth, without the support of divine Revelation; cultural relativity; and the corruptions and continuities of language. These are themes which no one can afford to despise, or need be ashamed of studying.”
― Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

“The ideas that on the one hand the Ring is a sort of psychic amplifier, magnifying the unconscious fears or selfishnesses of its owners, and on the other that it is a sentient creature with urges and powers of its own, are both present from the beginning, and correspond to the internal/Boethian and external/ Manichaean theories of evil.”
― Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

“Saruman is the most contemporary figure in Middle-earth, both politically and linguistically. He is on the road to ‘doublethink’ (which Orwell was to invent, or describe, at almost exactly the same time).”
― Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

“one can see The Lord of the Rings carrying out its function as a mediator between, on the one hand, Christian belief and the literature of the pre-Christian heroic world to which Tolkien was so much attached; and on the other, between Christian belief and the post-Christian world in which Tolkien thought himself increasingly to be living.”
― Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

“all set up what seemed to be a deep-seated contradiction between Boethian and Manichaean opinions, between authority and experience, between evil as an absence (‘the Shadow’) and evil as a force (‘the Dark Power’). In The Lord of the Rings this contradiction drives much of the plot. It is expressed not only through the paradoxes of wraiths and shadows, but also through the Ring.”
― Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

“All seizures of power, no matter how ‘strong or well-meaning’ the seizers, will go the same way. That’s what power does. Meanwhile, at exactly the same time as the publication of The Lord of the Rings William Golding was bringing out his fables, Lord of the Flies (1954), and The Inheritors (1955), the meaning of which Golding conveniently summarized for commentators in a later essay, ‘Fable’, in his collection The Hot Gates:

I must say that anyone who passed through those years [of World War II] without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head.
(Hot Gates, p. 87)

So the English choirboys, marooned on an idyllic desert island, invent murder and
human sacrifice and create the ‘lord of the flies’ himself, Beelzebub; in The Inheritors our ancestors, Cro-Magnon men, exterminate the gentle and friendly Neanderthals and create an entirely false legend of ogres and cannibals to justify their actions. A very similar if more complex argument was put forward, one might add, by the other great fantasy of the 1950s, T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, a work which began like Tolkien’s with a children’s book, The Sword in the Stone (1937), but took even longer than Tolkien’s to reach termination, appearing as a whole (though still unfinished) in 1958. White’s points are too many and too self-doubting to summarize readily, but there is at least no doubt that White saw in humanity a basic urge to destruction, expressed in a work written like The Lord of the Rings, nationibus in diro bello certantibus, ‘while the nations were striving in fearful war’. Orwell, Golding, White (and several other post-war authors of fantasy and fable): the thought that they expressed in their highly different ways was that people could never be trusted, least of all if they expressed a wish for the betterment of humanity. The major disillusionment of the twentieth century has been over political good intentions, which have led only to gulags and killing fields. That is why what Gandalf says has rung true to virtually everyone who reads it – though it is, I repeat, yet one more anachronism in Middle-earth, and the greatest of them, an entirely modern conviction.”
― Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

“[Tolkien's] rejection of mere militarism, his recognition that there are other qualities than those of a warrior or a general, backs up his claim that Gondor is a more reflective society, and one with a longer history, than the Riddermark. The claim is also tacitly demonstrated by Faramir’s capacity for subtlety, understatement, a reverence for truth which nevertheless includes a relatively oblique approach to it, well beyond Éomer’s blunt aggressions and withdrawals.”
― Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

“Many critics have complained of Tolkien’s archaic style in one section or another; they have failed to realize that he understood archaism far more technically than they ever could, and could switch it on and off at will, as he could modern colloquialism.”
― Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

“The moment when Pippin and Beregond hear the Black Riders and see them swoop on Faramir in ‘The Siege of Gondor’, V/4, is typical:

Suddenly as they talked they were stricken dumb, frozen as it were to listening stones. Pippin cowered down with his hands pressed to his ears; but Beregond… remained there, stiffened, staring out with starting eyes. Pippin knew the shuddering cry that he had heard: it was the same that he had heard long ago in the Marish of the Shire, but now it was grown in power and hatred, piercing the heart with a poisonous despair.

The last phrase is a critical one. The Ringwraiths work for the most part not physically but psychologically, paralysing the will, disarming all resistance. This may have something to do with the process of becoming a wraith yourself. That can happen as a result of a force from outside. As Gandalf points out, explaining the Morgul-knife, if the splinter had not been cut out, ‘you would have become a wraith under the dominion of the Dark Lord’. But more usually the suspicion is that people make themselves into wraiths. They accept the gifts of Sauron, quite likely with the intention of using them for some purpose which they identify as good. But then they start to cut corners, to eliminate opponents, to believe in some ‘cause’ which justifies everything they do. In the end the ‘cause’, or the habits they have acquired while working for the ‘cause’, destroys any moral sense and even any remaining humanity. The spectacle of the person ‘eaten up inside’ by devotion to some abstraction has been so familiar throughout the twentieth century as to make the idea of the wraith, and the wraithing-process, horribly recognizable, in a way non-fantastic.
The realism of this image of evil is increased by the examples we have of people on their way to becoming wraiths themselves. We have just the start of this, enough to be ominous, in the cases of Bilbo and Frodo, and the others mentioned above. Gollum is much further along the road, though in The Lord of the Rings Gollum, detached from the Ring many years before, is possibly beginning to recover, as is shown by the fact that he has started to call himself by his old name, Sméagol, the name he had when he used to be a hobbit, and is also occasionally and significantly able to say ‘I’. There is a striking dialogue between what one might call his hobbit-personality (Sméagol) and his Ring-personality (Gollum, ‘my precious’) in ‘The Passage of the Marshes’, which makes the point that the two are at least connected: one can imagine the one developing out of the other, pure evil growing out of mere ordinary human weakness and selfishness.
However, the best example of ‘wraithing’ in The Lord of the Rings must be
Saruman.”
― Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

“He threatened the authority of the arbiters of taste, the critics, the educationalists, the literati. He was as educated as they were, but in a different school. He would not sign the unwritten Articles of the Church of Literary English. His work was from the start appreciated by a mass market, unlike Ulysses, first printed in a limited number of copies designedly to be sold to the wealthy and cultivated alone.”
― Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

“No one, perhaps, is ever again going to emulate Tolkien in sheer quantity of effort, in building up the maps and the languages and the histories and the mythologies of one invented world, as no one is ever again going to have his philological resources to draw on.”
― Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

“The sense that ghosts cluster in old libraries is very strong.”
― Tom Shippey, The Road to Middle-Earth: How J.R.R. Tolkien Created a New Mythology