Columns::Visions of Middle-earth

since 12/15/98

Columns::March 4, 2002

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Visions of Middle-earth

By Beth Roberts
beth@uga.edu

Jonathan Evans, an associate professor of English, is a specialist in early English literature and languages, as was J.R.R.

Tolkien. Evans spoke with Columns about Tolkien’s trilogy The Lord of the Rings and its most recent translation to the screen with this winter’s The Fellowship of the Ring.

Columns: Did you discover Tolkien through your academic interests?

Evans: No, vice versa. I read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and then discovered along the way that the author was an Oxford University philologist and a Beowulf scholar, and I thought that must be a mighty good thing to do with one’s life.

Columns: Have you seen the movie?

Evans: I put it off for a while, waiting ’till I was ready--the book is so dear to my heart. But I did see it, finally--twice!--and I have to say I liked it.
I think the slight changes to the plot--emphasizing the love interest between Aragorn and Arwen, for example--are not only understandable concessions to Hollywood formula. They also actually improved on Tolkien’s plot. It is well-known that Tolkien himself wasn’t sure early on where the story was going--he thought he was writing a sequel to The Hobbit. It is that, of course, but it is also something ultimately much darker, much more serious. But even in the final version as published, The Fellowship of the Ring includes vestiges of the earlier--how should we call it--staggering plot-line in the first part of the book. I’ve always thought Tom Bombadil, Old Man Willow, and the barrow-wight were weak elements--apparently Peter Jackson did too. He cut them out.

Columns: How significant is the connection between The Lord of the Rings and Tolkien’s background in Anglo-Saxon poetry?

Evans: I would say his love of medieval languages and his capability as a scholar of medieval literature, his penchant for inventing imaginary languages and his creation of the imaginary world of Middle- earth all come from the same deep resources within himself. He said over and over again that he created the languages first and then he needed to create a world in which the

Jonathan Evans

languages made sense in relation to one another.
There’s an ancient naive assumption that the relationship between words and the external world is necessary and immutable. That has long ago been disproven by linguistic science. But there is a very durable conventional relationship between a word and the thing that it describes once the word has been coined, and that relationship endures through time. So words have histories, and words have historical associations and patterns of associations, one with another and between them and the world, that make language an extremely rich medium for communication. Tolkien was self-consciously aware of this.

Columns: The relationships between language and culture are particularly important in Tolkien, who invented words in other languages for other creatures and cultures.

Evans: The complex interrelationships between various races in the imagined world is meaningfully true to reality. I don’t think Tolkien was trying to be a multiculturalist--I think he would have eschewed the term as a kind of artificiality--but in trying to create a world with depth he automatically fell into creating a variety of races, with unique characteristics that define them and in some instances set up possibilities for conflict.
So this is a wonderful thing: that Tolkien’s movie now makes popular his books, and there’s the chance that his books will make more popular his view of language and literature. We in English and literature departments can take advantage of this to expose another generation of students to the wonders of language study and of creative writing informed by that historical view.

Columns: Why is Tolkien so popular?

Evans: I think it’s partly because he was a medievalist, and he understood the way some of the most intriguing plots and characters and settings work in the literature we all read. Secondly, his view of language and the depth of historical meaning in language is part of that.
One of the great Tolkien scholars, Thomas A. Shippey, who has written a number of books on Tolkien, recently said in an interview that Tolkien was regarded by readers as the author of the century, not only because he was the most popular but because he is literally “of ” the 20th century and its particular crises and problems. Shippey says Tolkien was marked by his experiences in World War I, at the battle of the Somme.
And The Lord of the Rings is written against the background of a cataclysmic war--a heroic cosmic struggle between the forces of good and the forces of evil. That lends depth, despite the fairy tale elements--trolls and dwarves and goblins and elves and dragons and so forth. Those things are in a way at a superficial level. Deeply, the story is about the nature of evil, the stakes of opposing evil through physical violence, what this does to distort human personality and how much of a burden it imposes on those who are called upon to exact justice. Shippey’s view is that Tolkien represents the struggles of the 20th century: industrialization, the mechanization of war, the destruction of the environment.
The other thing is the moral realism. I think people sense in Tolkien the roots of a definition of human being that recognizes that evil exists and can’t be explained away. But evil is not, in Tolkien’s theological view, a part of ultimate reality. He was a Catholic, and as such not a dualist. He believed that the universe begins and ends in acts of divine goodness. Human beings were in Tolkien’s view created as good and destined for ultimate goodness, but evil is real in the interim.

Columns: And we have the right, the opportunity, to make bad choices.

Evans: Yes--we have the right to choose and, as the existentialists love to point out to us, an almost unbearable responsibility of choice and all that that entails. Tolkien doesn’t shy away from those things.
One of the wonderful things about Tolkien is that you have characters who, while not in any sense absolute evil, represent a distortion of good which has gone very far away from the sources of goodness.
Even the good characters recognize that the temptation to misuse the power available to them is a temptation to become evil. Gandalf and Galadriel are offered the ring and refuse it because they recognize that the temptation would be too great. The movie highlights this very well, I think.

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Columns is produced by the UGA News Service, a unit of UGA Public Affairs.
Beth Roberts: Columns editor, Juliett Dinkins: Columns managing editor,
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Questions or comments should be directed to columns@uga.edu