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Looking Backward:
J.R.R. Tolkien's The Children of Húrin
2007 ($26)
Adam Sisman's The Friendship: Wordsworth & Coleridge
2007
($27.95)
 Even Lord
of the Rings, perhaps the most majestic backward glance in English
literature since Tennyson's Idylls of the King, owes a debt to
Modernism. Obviously, it presents itself through the eyes of the small,
both literally and metaphorically, rather than the heroic great: Frodo
Baggins and Sam Gamgee are hobbits, the most diminutive of Middle Earth's
sentient beings and the least noticed or noticing, a race in whose
world-view the great are not worth bothering with. Home and hearth matter;
wars do not. Less obviously, the War of the Ring echoes important
Modernist themes, especially that of a world laid waste and left in
fragments. The presumed wholeness of a golden past vanishes, to be
replaced by an age of iron. Even if the outcome of Tolkien's war smacks of
victory in a way that World War I did not, it also signals the beginning
of the Age of Man, a lesser creature, and the withdrawal of the Elves and
Dwarves, ancient, longer-lived beings with inestimable skills and
knowledge that we would call celestial, if such a concept existed
in Tolkien's world. Above all, the signal event of the book, the one
occurrence without which nothing else might have mattered, takes place not
because of the wisdom of the wise or the valor of the stout-hearted or
even the dogged determination of the small to be faithful to the great:
the Ring perishes because of one individual's greed and (arguably)
madness; the world of law, decency and civilty survives by a hair, saved
by someone who cared nothing for it.
Less obviously, the War of the Ring echoes important Modernist themes, especially that of a world laid waste and left in fragments.
The presumed wholeness of a golden past vanishes, to be replaced by an age of iron.
What, then, shall we make of The Children of Húrin, this
Johnny-come-lately to the Tolkien canon, appearing 70 years after The
Hobbit and almost half that long after the author's death? Unlike much
of the other work shepherded into print by Christopher Tolkien, the
author's son, The Children of Húrin as we now have it is neither
fragmentary nor scholarly (like his titles which trace the development,
over more than a decade, of Lord of the Rings. It is a complete
work, stitched together from variant versions from different decades, with
a beginning, middle and end; with character and setting and subplot; with
character development; and with the satisfying wholeness of well-crafted
fiction. Unlike Lord of the Rings, the conclusion of which demands
to be considered triumphant, if full of sadness, The Children of
Húrin is tragic in both the Greek and Shakespearean senses, and
instructive, in an odd way, edifying if you will, in the manner of
some of the more brutal fairy tales. One might even consider it the first
work of pre-Raphaelite fiction since William Morris.
Though Húrin gets the title, the center of the story is his son Túrin.
In the way of Tolkien and the early medieval tales he loved, Túrin is a
fierce and able warrior, but too headstrong to let mind, whether his own
or another's, temper his heart. This flaw--though many readers will balk
at calling it such--this having too much heart makes it impossible
for Túrin to carve out a happy or successful life for himself. Because he
has determined to resist, with all that is within him, both Morgoth, the
Dark Lord of the First Age, and Morgoth's servants (including Orcs and a
dragon), Túrin repeatedly has a hand, directly or indirectly, in the death
of loved ones. The self he insists upon being creates much of the tragedy
that marks his life and death, far beyond the not atypically tragic
circumstances of his childhood and his father's capture and imprisonment
by Morgoth. Túrin has an admirably well-developed sense of right and
wrong, but it contributes to two traits, both of which cause much grief in
his life. More than once, Túrin refuses to wait for a wiser time to
respond to the foul deeds of others, whether they are Morgoth's thralls or
simply men or elves who have opposed or betrayed him. His sense of right
and justice also has its part in the hubris which leads him to remain
quiet in the face of accusations which he considers it beneath him to
respond to. When he might mitigate an incriminating episode--the death of
an opponent--by testifying that the opponent assaulted him (Túrin) first,
Túrin treats a once-trusted colleague's interpretation of the scene as a
lack of faith in Túrin, thus rendering him unworthy of the respect in
which Túrin previously held him.
Túrin's life might have gone much more positively. . . if he had simply listened to counsels of
discretion and patience.
The reader constantly wants to find Túrin guiltless, the victim of an
evil time rather than himself, because his desire to behave with rectitude
and courage is always near, even when he becomes the leader of a band of
outlaws and restrains some of their darker and more selfish impulses. And
yet the "alternate history" seems clear: Túrin's life might have gone much
more positively, more than once, if he had simply listened to counsels of
discretion and patience.
It is apparent that Tolkien had in mind here a tale remarkably unlike
those two he is most praised for. From the "antique" and lean writing
style (like so much of the unfinished works Christopher Tolkien has
brought to print), to the incidents redolent of Greek myth (be prepared to
think of both Prometheus and Oedipus), to the more layered treatment of
the elves (not all are noble), The Children of Húrin demands a
different commitment from the reader: rather than time (The Children of
Húrin is shorter than The Hobbit), Tolkien asks for the
reader's attention and imagination. The Grimm Brothers would have
approved.
As for the look of the book, I don't much care for the illustrations
which Alan Lee created for the book. Considered an interpreter of Tolkien
definitive enough to have shaped the cinematography of Peter Jackson,
Lee's treatments partake, to my mind, too much of fantasy and not enough
of variant (or very ancient) history. It is not so much the what as the
how: the small black-and-white drawings which head the chapters are quite
fine, but the color paintings scattered throughout the text are simply too
Romantic, a tendency which, I think, falsifies the very grim world which
Tolkien created.
If Wordsworth comes to seem cold and ungrateful, surely Coleridge's exasperating inability to stop
flitting around and do something might have contributed to that
withdrawal.
Adam Sisman's biography of the relationship of William Wordsworth and
Samuel Taylor Coleridge could hardly be less like Tolkien's novel, and yet
the two books share a central theme: the ways in which otherwise good men
allow a too-deeply-held sense of self to darken what might have been, if
not rosy, at least a good deal less black. My tendency, finishing The
Friendship, is to say that Coleridge comes off better: warmer, more
giving, more human. But Sisman's portrait of Wordsworth, the young
radical, invites a great deal of sympathy. The character we may think of
as starchy and self-important in later years was also, without denying
either of those attributes, lusty enough as a young man to father a
daughter out of wedlock and was virtually (if not entirely) atheist for
many years. If Wordsworth comes to seem cold and ungrateful, surely
Coleridge's exasperating inability to stop flitting around and do
something might have contributed to that withdrawal. Interestingly, a
central part of the legacy of both men is what they never accomplished:
Coleridge's poetic achievement was essentially complete before he was
thirty years old, though his admirers (and he himself) had expected much
more of him; and Wordsworth, despite the volume of his collected poetry
(Byron, remember, called him Wordswords) never wrote his intended
magnum opus, The Recluse.
Mail to Cooper Renner
About
Cooper
Cooper Renner edits the online magazine elimae. Chinese
Checkers: Three Fictions, his translation from the work of Mexican
author Mario Bellatin, is now available from Ravenna Press.
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