[Bêthberry]

A day full of adventures leaves very little time for the Downs, but here are some tardy replies and thoughts . . .

Originally Posted by MatthewM

Beth, about that Shakesphere comment, what did Tolkien think of him?

Here's a brief rundown of the more accessible Will-whatnots in the Letters. Then on to the harder candy. There are two areas that are tantalizing in terms of the imaginative space Tolkien created from reading Shakespeare .

Tolkien Sr. writes some fasinating comments about Hamlet to his son Christopher in Letter #76, comments which demonstrate clearly that Tolkien was very familiar with Shakespeare's work. Wise in the ways of theatre, he offers an opinion that, in light of fans' responses to Jackson's film (and the musical debacle), is fascinatingly ironic.

Originally Posted by Tolkien

But it [the production] emphasised more strongly than anything I have ever seen the folly of reading Shakespeare (and annotating him in the study), except as a concomitant of seeing his plays acted. . . . Could one only have seen it without ever having read it or knowing the plot, it would have been terrific. . . . But to my surprise the part that came out as the most moving, almost intolerably so, was the one that in reading I always found a bore: the scene of mad Ophelia singing her snatches.

Letter #163 to W.H. Auden (who had been one of Tolkien's students at Oxford) gives us in a note a wonderful example of a tendency quite common in many authors: a seeming denial of obligation which really speaks to a profoundly moving experience of inspiration, influence, anxiety, first steps.

Originally Posted by Tolkien

I had very little particular, conscious, intellectual, intention in mind at any point [... but was driven to it (ie, the writing) by the scarcity of literature of the sort that I wanted to read... [Here the text of the letter is amended by a long note, which follows]

Take the Ents, for instance. I did not consciously invent them at all. The chapter called 'Treebeard', from Treebeards' first remark on p. 66, was written off more or less as it stands, with an effect on my self (escept for labour pains) almost like reading some one else's work. And I like Ents now because they do not seem to have anything to do with me. I daresay something had been going on in the 'unconscious' for some time, and that accounts for my feeling throughout, especially when struck, that I was not inventing but reporting (imperfectly) and had at time to wait till 'what really happened' came through. But looking back analytically I should say that Ents are composed of philology, literature, and life. They owe their name to the eald enta geweorc of Anglo-Saxon, and their connexion to stone. Their part in the story is due, I think, to my bitter disappointment and disgust from schooldays with the shabby use made in Shakespeare of the coming of 'Great Birnam wood to high Dusinane hill': I longed to devise a setting in which the trees might really march to war. . . .

Later in this same Letter #163 Tolkien provides a brief overview of his experiences as a schoolboy:

Originally Posted by Tolkien

I went to King Edward's School and spent most of my time learning Latine and Greek; but I also learned English. Not English Literature! Except Shakespeare (which I disliked cordially), the chief contacts with poetry were when one was made to translate it into Latin.

It is in the lecture/essay On Fairy-Stories that Tolkien expresses his fundamental objection to what Shakespeare with with fairy creatures. In part Tolkien's objection is due to his thought that Fantasy is best left to words rather than to other forms of representation. He also dislikes the idea that Fairy is determined solely by the appearance as characters of elves, fairies, dwarves, trolls, giants, dragons. Here he greatly chastises Drayton's Nymphidia especially but also mentions that modern ideas about the nature of fairies derives from Midsummer Night's Dream. Yet it is the witches from, again, the Scottish play, that also draw his regrets.

Originally Posted by You know who

In Macbeth, when it is read, I find the witches tolerable: they have a narrative function and some hint of dark significance; thought they are vulgarised, poor things of their kind. They are almost intolerable in the play. They would be quite intolerable, if I were not fortified by some memory of them as they in the story as read. . . . To be dissolved, or to be degraded, is the likely fate of Fantasy when a dramatist tries to use it, even such a dramatist as Shakespeare. Macbeth is indeed a work by a playwright who ought, at least on this ocassion, to have written a story, if he had the skill or patience for that art.

It is fair to say that these comments from Tolkien about Shakespeare are not quite the argumentative, inflamatory rhetoric that Pullman uses about both Tolkien and Lewis. What interests me is why these authors make these claims about their predecessors.

Lal and others have suggested that Pullman is playing to an audience. This could well be. Certainly these days 'in your face' and edginess are the favoured styles du jour. However, I wonder if there isn't something else also at play, something which actually is common to both Pullman and Tolkien.

Pullman cannot be immune nor silent about Tolkien, for Tolkien's presence as a precursor in the development of fantasy is vast, huge, blinding to lesser lights. Similarly, Shakespeare's presence also thunders through the ages of Eng lit. After all, Shakespeare still is produced on the stage, around the world. Few people see productions of Milton's literary plays and few people read of their own volition Paradise Lost. Shakespeare, in our day as in Tolkien's day, is still a writer with a contemporary presence.

So both Tolkien and Pullman had a major literary ghost to dispel--and all the more so since those ghosts had, I suspect, profound influences on their own writing. I'm not talking about dry-as-dust-pedantic "sources". I'm talking about a writer whose work acts as a stimulus to a later writer, a catalyst. And in this case, perhaps both Pullman and Tolkien resist that catalyst, almost as if, in speaking denial, one were erradicating the very nature of something which influenced one so much as a writer. Is this part of what it means to carve out one's own personal space as a writer? Rather than 'completing' their forefathers, perhaps Tolkien and Pullman both found/find themselves bound to find fault with a writer who profoundly influenced his own work? The tone of that fault varies, as the tone of the ages each man lived in varied, but essentially are they both, when they comment upon his fabled predecessor, trying to put his own ideas in a prominent light? In order not to appear to be repeating, they propound upon a writer who in fact gave them the very materials which they use to hew their own space in the forest of words.

In other words, if Tolkien weren't so great a mark, would Pullman throw stones at him? If Shakespeare hadn't 'done' elves so famously, would Tolkien feel the need to correct him? For both writers, Tolkien and Pullman, there are some fascinating parallels that can be found between their new and original work and the work of a forefather.