Now that the Jackson films are out, one might expect a lessening in the spate of new books on J.R.R. Tolkien. This is not the case. They cluster thick as leaves in Vallambrosa. The phenomenon is to some extent attributable to Jacksonian publicity, but more due to the increasing relevance the new century finds in an important author from the century just passed.
One of the new books is Edmund Wainwright's Tolkien's Mythology for England, subtitled A Middle-earth Companion, a slim volume published by Anglo-Saxon Books. The work is aimed at a general audience, readers of The Lord of the Rings wanting a look behind the story into the history of its making, and the life of the man who wrote it. The dust jacket announces that the book "focuses on The Lord of the Rings and shows how Tolkien's knowledge of early English literature and history helped shape the book's plot and characters."
Thus, of the six sections--"The Master of Middle-earth," "A Mythology in the Making," "The Legacy of Heorot," "The Languages," "Where are the English in the Mythology for England?" and "A Mythology for All Middle-earth?" plus a time-line of The Lord of the Rings--the longest by far is "The Legacy of Heorot." The "Legacy," comprising 62 of the book's scant 118 pages, is alphabetically arranged entries on the names, places, and races of Middle-earth, with a strong emphasis on "the world of ancient myth and legend and of the early English and their neighbours."
Wainwright's attempt to provide a mini-biography, place Tolkien's mythos in the context of myth in general and medieval myth in particular, explore the influence of his work on his art, connect his invented languages to those in the real world, and investigate the extraordinary popularity of The Lord of the Rings is an ambitious one. I wish I could say his book succeeds in its aim, but I can't, because it doesn't--at least not sufficiently to warrant recommendation. It would be impossible to shoehorn that amount of valuable information into this book's brief compass, and the attempt to do so results too often in scholarship that is hurried, careless with facts, and guilty of misinterpretation or misrepresentation of data.
Here are examples. The book's opening sentence: "John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born at Bloemfontein, South Africa in 1892" (11), ignores the historical fact that Bloemfontein was the capital of what was then not South Africa but the Orange Free State. A minor mistake in detail, to be sure, but emblematic of more to come. Even more misleading is the statement that "John's father died in 1896 and his mother returned to England" (11). This reverses the order of two formative events in Tolkien's childhood. Mabel Tolkien first took her young sons to England for home leave, and while they were there Tolkien's father died. The order is important, for the correct sequence makes clear that the three-year-old boy left a living father, who then disappeared from his life. The effect of such deprivation on so young a child has implications for Tolkien's work as important as the concomitant and more often noted transition from African desert to English greenery.
Of Tolkien's university career at Oxford, Wainwright states that "John went off to Exeter College Oxford in 1911 to study the Classics, the Germanic languages--especially Old English and Gothic--and also Welsh and Finnish." The implication is that these were all component parts of a formal course of study, whereas the fact was that, while he did indeed work with these languages, Tolkien's interest in Welsh and Finnish was a private enterprise and no part of the Exeter syllabus.
Tolkien's books fare little better than his life, and it is here that the heart of the book, "The Legacy of Heorot" must be considered. Many entries are informative, some surprisingly so. I was fascinated to learn that "eleventy-one" would have been a possible number in the Alfredian system of numeration, although "would have been" and "possible" make this entry speculative rather than definitive. Unfortunately, the inaccuracies in other entries make the entirety suspect. Bilbo is credited with tricking the trolls into argument until the rising sun turns them to stone, when any reader of The Hobbit can tell you it was Gandalf who kept them talking. Legolas Greenleaf is not properly a Sindarin, or Grey-elf, but a Sylvan or Wood-elf, distantly related to the Sindar through the Teleri. Again, a minor detail, but one that glosses over the complexities of Elven sub-groups and ignores the back-fitting involved in meshing details from The Hobbit with those of The Silmarillion. Treating Tolkien's fictive world as if it were a seamless whole, when it is not, does him no service.
Tom Bombadil is not, as Wainwright maintains, characterized by Tolkien as "the spirit of pure intellect." A search through references to Tom in Tolkien's Letters turns up no such statement, although Tolkien does describe him (in Letters, 92) as "an embodying of pure (real) natural science." Natural science is not the same as pure intellect, however, and anything farther removed from Tom's essential nature would be hard to imagine. Neither, as Wainwright has it, does Frodo in a prescient dream see himself climbing a tower overlooking the sea. Frodo does indeed dream of a tower in the house at Crickhollow, but although he greatly desires "to climb the tower and see the sea," he does not, in the dream, do so. Nor is this dream actualized as "almost the last incident in the book." On his way to embark for Valinor Frodo indeed passes towers by the sea, but climbs none of them.
A more seriously damaging misreading has Frodo and Sam, at this point in the story, "escape from death" by voyaging to the Undying Lands. The application to hobbits (meant as a branch of the human race) of this quote from Tolkien's essay "On Fairy-stories," subverts the author's purpose in creating the two races of Elves and Men, and is a serious misstep in a reference work. Relevant passages in the Letters show Tolkien to be unequivocal that Frodo will die like any mortal, and that his journey into the West is for healing, not immortality.
Such inaccuracies with readily available information raise suspicions about the book's promise to help the reader "gain an insight into a culture and way-of-life that extolled values which are as valid today as they were over 1,000 years ago." The assumption that all of northern Europe and the British Isles shared a culture, way of life, and "values" homogenizes differences into a one-size-fits-all medievalism that Tolkien himself inveighed against. These generalizations suggest caution when approaching the book's more technical and precise section on languages and writing systems. The language sources listed in the Bibliography, Jim Allen's Introduction to Elvish and his work on Sindarin, Quenya, runes and Tengwar, and Ruth Noel's The Languages of Tolkien's Middle-earth, are both years out of date, though Allen's work is sound as far as it goes. Much has been done on Tolkien's languages and scripts since these were published, however, and the information is easily obtainable in the Etymologies section of The Lost Road, vol. 5 of the History of Middle-earth, as well as in the publications of Parma Eldalamberon, a current and authorized journal of Tolkien linguistics and scripts. The time-line in the Appendix is superfluous, since there is a better, longer, and more detailed one in Appendix B of The Lord of the Rings, available to any reader who can turn a page.
On the plus side, Wainwright is insightful in attributing much of the popularity of The Lord of the Rings to "nostalgia, longing, the sense of great loss and sadness as cherished and beautiful things pass beyond reach." He is correct in saying that such themes "stand behind the author of Beowulf's attempt to marry up the lost world of Germanic legend with the reality of Christian England," and even more correct in locating that nostalgia in Tolkien's own World War I experience, and the longing of troops from rural England for their homes and families.
Nevertheless, what this book seeks to do has been done better and more thoroughly in other works, and the interested Tolkien reader would be well-advised to go to the authoritative sources. Humphrey Carpenter's excellent Tolkien: A Biography has yet to be superseded as the best introduction to the author's life and work; and Tom Shippey's The Road to Middle-earth is unsurpassed in its analysis of Tolkien's creative imagination in the context of his knowledge of medieval languages and literature. Best of all would be Tolkien himself, for the History of Middle-earth and his collected Letters offer horse's-mouth information about the making of The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and The Silmarillion. All these sources are dependable where Wainwright is often chancy and too often just plain wrong.