The Structure of The Lord of the Rings

[Bêthberry]

I'm coming in late with a reply here, but I have a very interesting observation about Anglo-Saxon culture which I think might shed some light on this milieu/setting issue.

We seem to recognise fairly clearly the features, of, say, Beowulf which inspired Tolkien--the heroic ideal, the rings and fealty, the camaraderie of the mead hall, the wonderfully robust lines of alliterative verse. We tend not to talk about any influences from OE religious verse, or the riddles, or prose, but those exist also. The poem The Dream of the Rood, for instance, is written in the voice of the cross on which Christ was crucified, a talking tree, if you will. (The Cross, the Rood, that is, refers to itself as a tree.) Then there is the theme of exile and the sea. There are other aspects of Old English literature and Anglo-Saxon culture which also appealed to Tolkien besides the heroic ideal.

For the sake of brevity, I am going to copy a very interesting comment which Peter Ackroyd makes in his book Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination. I won't quote passages from OE texts, but for the time being ask us to consider this idea.

We may identify here a sense of belonging which has more to do with location and with territory, therefore, than with any atavistic native impulses. There has been much speculation on the subject of location theory, in which the imperative of place is more significant than any linguistic or racial concerns. In The Spirit of the People: An Analysis of the English Mind, published in 1912, Ford Maddox Ford suggested that "it is absurd to use the almost obsolescent word 'race'." He noted in particular the descent of the English "from Romans, from Britons, from Anglo-Saxons, from Poitevins, from Scotch..." which is perhaps the best antidote to the nonsensical belief in some 'pure' Anglo-Saxon people. In its place he invoked the spirit of territory with his belief that "It is not--the whole of Anglo-Saxondom--a matter of race but one, quite simply, of place -- of place and of spirit, the spirit being born of the environment." In Ford Maddox Ford's account that tradition is in some sense transmitted or communicated by the territory. It is a theory which will also elucidate certain arguments within this book.

I would suggest it is this "imperative of place" which Tolkien draws upon from his Anglo-Saxon learning. It has much to do with the fullness of detail and specificity of site in LotR. And more: I think it is glorying in this sense of territory which holds all the disparate elements of the story together, the double stranded plot, the rambling, picaresque plotting, the symbolic unity of the Ring and the Shire, the paralleling of so much. Note that I am not saying the Scouring of the Shire is a mistake because we cannot predict it from the earlier anticipations of plot. I am saying that Tolkien's profound sense of the loss of the rural landscape to the machine is part of his lament for a value of this earlier tradition.

The runes from "The Dream of the Rood" are carved on the Ruthwell Cross, a stone cross dated to the late seventh centure, which creates, in Ackroyd's words, "a sacred topography of the nation." I felt some of this even this even late in the seventh age when I toured Great Britain last summer. At least, I felt it in England, but not in Glasgow. The sense of historical place I experience in North America is very different: In one city, the historical site of a great find of oil, which brought wealth and prosperity beyond imagining to the province, was in the way of a large, multi-lane highway which would connect the province. What was done? The oil derrick and the tourist site were moved a mile away, to a spot which never produced oil and never will. (Shades of A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.) So much for a tangible, spiritual sense of location. It's rather like saying grape juice will do instead of wine. (Lest I raise any hackles with that statement, let me say my family's religious inheritance is Protestant.)

I cannot imagine this ever happening 'in Middle-earth'. The sense of place is palpable in LotR, in the sanctuaries of the Bombadil household, Rivendell, Lothlorien, in the experience of forest in the Old Forest and Fangorn, in the way Rohan is connected with wide open prairie and plains, or Minas Tirith with the walled city. Every place is a measure of continuity and identity. And even the landscapes of darkness have discriminating topologies which in the very absence of this continuity ironically reconfirms it. Place and space reflect the measure of being connected to Arda. This furnishes not just the characters but readers also with "a communal memory of place".

This might not 'drive' the story, but to me it holds it together like the crisscrossing stone walls which roll up and down over the English countryside.