Book Review - 'The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays' by JRR Tolkien
‘The seven ‘essays’ by JRR Tolkien assembled in this paperback were with one exception delivered as general lectures on particular occasions; and while they mostly arose out of Tolkien’s work in medieval literature, they are accessible to all. Two of them are concerned with Beowulf, including the well-known lecture whose title is taken for this book, and one with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, given in the University of Glasgow in 1953.
Also included… is the lecture English and Welsh; the Valedictory Address to the University of Oxford in 1959… Most famous of all is On Fairy-Stories, a discussion of the nature of fairy-tales and fantasy, which gives insight into Tolkien’s approach to the whole genre.
The pieces in this collection cover a period of nearly thirty years, beginning six years before the publication of The Hobbit, with a unique ‘academic’ lecture on his invention (calling it A Secret Vice) and concluding with his farewell to professorship, five years after the publication of The Lord of the Rings.’
This book is my first taste of Tolkien’s non-fiction work.
I was a little apprehensive when I started it, thinking I might struggle to understand it as he was a university professor with a massive love for language.
I needn’t have worried.
While I had to re-read certain passages, I found his style fun and accessible; he explains things in such a way that non-expert readers can understand.
Having said that, I won’t even pretend that I understood the essays, ‘On Translating Beowulf’ and ‘English and Welsh’ as they are quite technical. I admit I didn’t finish reading those two.
Of the seven essays in this book, only two haven’t been previously published, including ‘A Secret Vice’ (1931).
It covers Tolkien’s talent for inventing languages, which impressively resulted in the languages of the different races, especially Elvish, in ‘The Lord of the Rings’.
“This idea of using the linguistic faculty for amusement is… deeply interesting to me… The instinct for ‘linguistic invention’ – the fitting of notion to oral symbol, and pleasure in contemplating the new relation established, is rational… In these invented languages the pleasure is more keen than it can be even in learning a new language… because more personal and fresh, more open to experiment of trial and error. And it is capable of developing into an art…”
In the ‘Introduction’, Christopher Tolkien states about ‘A Secret Vice’, “that the audience was a philological society is evident…”
Given the audience, I find it endearing that, included in Tolkien’s essay, is his reticence to share examples of his invented language…
“The time has come now, I suppose, when I can no longer postpone the shame-faced revelation of specimens of my own more considered effort… Be kindly. For if there is any virtue in this kind of thing, it is in its intimacy, in its peculiarly shy individualism. I can sympathize with the shrinking of other language-makers, as I experience the pain of giving myself away…”
And I love his closing words:
“… you are the heir of the ages. You have not to grope after the dazzling brilliance of invention of the free adjective, to which all human language has not yet fully attained. You may say – green sun or dead life – and set the imagination leaping.
“Language has both strengthened imagination and been freed by it. Who shall say whether the free adjective has created images bizarre and beautiful, or the adjective been freed by strange and beautiful pictures in the mind?”
The essay, ‘The Monsters and the Critics’, is Tolkien’s effort at reclaiming ‘Beowulf’ from those who were/are more interested in taking it apart to study under a microscope instead of enjoying it for what it is – an Old English poem telling of flesh-and-blood heroes seeking glorious death.
When the boys and I read ‘Beowulf’ back in our homeschooling days, we read it as a story. I didn’t attempt to turn it into a literature-study. During that period, we were reading older works, like Howard Pyle’s ‘The Story of King Arthur and His Knights’, and I wanted them to enjoy the stories, not get bogged down with picking them apart to ‘find the meaning’ behind them.
In Tolkien’s opinion, the literature surrounding ‘Beowulf’ tends to see it and examine it as a historical document, instead of understanding it as a poem.
He argues that, in a way, the poem itself “has contributed to its own critical misfortunes” because of the way it’s been written – “The author has used an instinctive historical sense… but he has used it with a poetical and not a historical object.”
Tolkien talks of the “significance of… myth” which “is at its best when… presented by a poet who feels rather than makes explicit what his theme portends; who presents it as incarnate in the world of history and geography… For myth is alive at once and in all its parts…”
The ‘monsters’ in the title of this essay refer to Grendel and the Dragon, and that’s what Tolkien mainly focuses on.
Referring to stories from the North, he points out there was room for “myth and heroic legend” where “the prince of the heroes of the North… was a dragon-slayer.”
These two features – the dragon and the hero whose greatest deed is slaying the dragon – are alluded to in the Norse and Old English form of ‘Beowulf’.
One of my favourite lines in this essay is – “A dragon is no idle fancy.”
He goes on to say, “Whatever may be his origins… the dragon in legend is a potent creation of men’s imagination, richer in significance than his barrow is in gold.”
Stating that Beowulf’s dragon is, perhaps, not the sort of dragon many are used to, he argues that for the poem, the dragon is as it should be, the embodiment of “the evil side of heroic life… of all life”.
Thus Beowulf, a man, has to face “a foe more evil than any human enemy… before us, and yet incarnate in time, walking in heroic history, and treading the named lands of the North.”
How thrilling does that sound? A man, a mere mortal, having to face an evil much older and greater.
Yet, in the time that Tolkien wrote this essay, this was considered “the radical defect of Beowulf…”
Tolkien’s turn of phrase is delicious as he begins his argument concerning the different ways in which we can respect and admire the hero, regardless of where he stands in relation to the monsters:
“Let us by all means esteem the old heroes: men caught in the chains of circumstance or of their own character, torn between duties equally sacred, dying with their backs to the wall.”
Reading this essay, there were times I forgot I was reading a non-fiction piece.
It’s so easy to get carried away quoting passages of Tolkien’s writing…
He draws attention to the fusion of old – “early Northern literature” and “the tradition of pagan imagination as it survived in Icelandic” – and the new – “Christendom and… the Scriptures”.
Although writing a poem dealing with a pagan past, the author brought “probably first to his task a knowledge of Christian poetry…”
So, despite being a man, a hero from the world of old gods and beliefs, Beowulf is presented in a manner similar to a Christian knight. But without the romance and the status of conquering hero one expects from such tales.
Surely that doesn’t make the poem any less meaningful, less powerful.
Surely it doesn’t lessen Beowulf’s stature as ‘hero’ because the poem presents him ‘only’ as a slayer of dragons.
Tolkien’s love for this great poem is obvious, and this essay helped me better appreciate that far-off world inhabited by pagan heroes who understood “the wages of heroism is death.”
The other essay that hadn’t been published previously is ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’.
An Arthurian poem, it concerns the appearance of a Green Knight who enters King Arthur’s hall during a feast on New Year’s Day. Riding a green horse and carrying a green axe, he issues a challenge – any man brave enough may take his axe and strike him one unopposed blow on the condition that, after a year and a day, he promises to allow the Green Knight to give him one unopposed blow in return.
It is Sir Gawain who takes up the challenge.
Tolkien describes this as “one of the masterpieces of fourteenth-century art in England… it belongs to that literary kind which has deep roots in the past… made of tales often told before and elsewhere, and of elements that derive from remote times…”
In the essay, he gives his attention to what he sees as the neglected part of the poem, “the temptation of Sir Gawain and his confession.”
I know the story but I’ve not read the poem.
As with the essay on ‘Beowulf’, reading Tolkien’s explanation for this requires the reader’s full attention to understand the points he’s making.
In both the essays, I believe he succeeded in showing both men as real people; I, for one, understood them better.
‘On Fairy-Stories’ is the essay I was most looking forward to reading and the one I saved until last.
The introduction to this essay displays, yet again, Tolkien’s fabulous phrasing and love of language:
“The realm of fairy-story is wide and deep and high and filled with many things: all manner of beasts and birds are found there; shoreless seas and stars uncounted; beauty that is enchantment, and an ever-present peril; both joy and sorrow as sharp as swords. In that realm a man may, perhaps, count himself fortunate to have wandered, but its very richness and strangeness tie the tongue of a traveller who would report them. And while he is there it is dangerous for him to ask too many questions, lest the gates should be shut and the keys be lost.”
He begins by talking about what a fairy story is before going on to talk about its origins.
Then he explains, clearly and eloquently, why he believes it’s an “error” to assume “that children are the natural or the specially appropriate audience for fairy-stories.”
Tolkien points out that the idea of linking fairy stories and children only came about when children spent more time in the nursery or playroom. As adults didn’t want such stories amongst them, they were sent off, out of sight, in the same way as “shabby… old-fashioned furniture is relegated to the playroom”.
It is this relegation, argues Tolkien, that has damaged fairy stories. It is this banishment to a place – the playroom – where it ends up misused and ignored, where its “cut off from full adult art”, which has led to it being ruined.
He doesn’t say that children shouldn’t read fairy stories; they can read whatever they wish to read.
His point is fairy stories shouldn’t be “specially associated with children”, which has led to inadvertently viewing any adult who reads them with disdain.
Where the essay really drew me in is when Tolkien dives into what fairy stories offer adults – “Fantasy, Recovery, Escape, Consolation”, things that adults – mostly – need far more than children.
In his usual eloquent fashion, he defends the imagination, from which fantasy is birthed, calling fantasy “a natural human activity.”
And he highlights the grounding of fantasy in our recognisable reality:
“For creative Fantasy is founded upon the hard recognition that things are so in the world as it appears under the sun; on a recognition of fact, not a slavery to it. So upon logic was founded the nonsense that displays itself in the tales and rhymes of Lewis Carroll. If men really could not distinguish between frogs and men, fairy-stories about frog-kings would not have arisen.”
The ‘consolation’ that he speaks of is “the joy of the happy ending… this joy, which… fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially ‘escapist’. In its fairy-tale… setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of… sorrow and failure… it denies… universal final defeat… giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant in grief.”
I enjoyed this essay, and the ones on ‘Beowulf’ and ‘Sir Gawain’ so much, I read them again after finishing the book the first time.
It wasn’t simply because there’s so much to take in, but also because Tolkien’s great love of and enthusiasm for language shines through.
I found it pure joy to immerse myself in his style of writing. And I know, without a doubt, I will be reading these essays again.