June 2002: Vol. 81, No. 3June 2002: Vol. 81, No. 3Interview by Beth Roberts
|
 Evans reveres Tolkien, but lauds Hollywood for embellishing the Aragorn-Arwen love story. |
nglish professor Jonathan Evans is a specialist in early English literature and languages, as was J.R.R. Tolkien, whose Lord of the Rings trilogy is in the news again, thanks to the new film, "The Fellowship of the Ring."
Q: Have you seen the movie?
Evans: I put it off for a while—the book is so dear to my heart. But I have to say I liked it. The slight changes to the plot—emphasizing the love interest between Aragorn and Arwen, for example—actually improved on Tolkien's plot.
It is well-known that Tolkien 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 [film director] Peter Jackson did too. He cut them.
Q: How significant is the connection between The Lord of the Rings and Tolkien's background in Anglo-Saxon poetry?
Evans: 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 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.
Q: 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.
Q: Why is Tolkien so popular?
Evans: 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. 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 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 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.