Not the Book of the Century

With the release of the film adaptation of "The Lord of the Rings" and the close of the 20th century, T.A. Shippey picked the right moment to put forth his literary rescue mission: "J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century."

Shippey, an Old English academic and previous biographer of Tolkien, didn't just set out to rehabilitate Tolkien in the eyes of the literati. As the title of his new book implies, he shot for the moon.

Tolkien is the author of the 20th century, argues Shippey, for two principal reasons. Numerous reader surveys consistently find Tolkien taking top honors, but more importantly, Tolkien most adequately expressed the challenge and nature of evil, which Shippey contends was the dominant theme of the century.

By exploring evil outside strict realism, Tolkien shares a connection to the canon of work by George Orwell ("Animal Farm"), William Golding ("The Lord of the Flies") and Kurt Vonnegut ("Slaughterhouse Five"), among others.

Tolkien's contribution to the discussion, explains Shippey, is the concept of the ringwraith. Tolkien, like Shippey, was a philologist fascinated by the mysterious origins and meanings of old words. According to Shippey, the Oxford English Dictionary offered Tolkien two contradictory illustrations of the word "wraith":

• An apparition or spectre of a dead person: a phantom or ghost.

• An immaterial or spectral appearance of a living being.

Add to this mystery the other possible etymologies for "wraith," such as "ride," "writhe" and "wroth," and you begin to see Tolkien's creative solution to the word puzzle.

But what does this have to do with advancing notions of evil? Just like the duality in defining "wraith," an ancient debate continues about whether evil is a substantive force (argued best by Manichaeas), or whether it is merely an absence of good (argued best by Boethius).

While this may feel like an academic debate, the generation that had to live through World War II and the Holocaust had to grapple with the nature of evil. If evil was an absence of good, it would be easy to be lulled into Neville Chamberlain's pacifist stance. If evil was a substantive force, than whither God in a century where evil seemed to have the upper hand?

Tolkien's ringwraiths synthesize both interpretations of evil, says Shippey, and illustrate like never before a word that first appeared in the OED in 1989: "addictive." The ring gives its bearer the ability to fulfill desires. The evil power in the ring fits the Manichaean model of external evil. But the ring's power of corruption only seems to act to the degree that the ringbearer has a weakness, a need, an absence of will. This element of the story fits the Boethian model of evil as an absence. Merge the two and you get something akin to an addict — or a ringwraith, in Tolkien's world. The ringwraiths are former kings of men whose lust for power made them shadow people — present yet without substance.

This is only the beginning of Shippey's explanatory power, and his tome is highly recommended to any Tolkien fan (or detractor).

Shippey's brilliance, however, is matched by his glaring oversight. He is keenly aware that some critics have called "The Lord of the Rings" juvenile, assuming that this is because Tolkien uses the genre of fantasy, a charge he easily deflates.

But what truly makes the work boyish is, plainly, the lack of female characters. Throughout the trilogy we meet droves of male characters of all ages, of all races. But you can name on one hand the number who seem to have the capacity for love in anything but the "fellow-ship" sense of the word. If there is tension in these back corners of the plot where romance is relegated, it is the whitewashed tension of lovers thwarted by customs or fathers. In other words, the amorous conflicts belong to a bygone era or to an adolescent sensibility.

More boyish still is the portrayal of the few female characters that do appear in the story: Galadriel, Arwen, Eowyn and Rose. They are caricature women. Rose is the housewife and baby-factory. Eowyn is the tomboy, dressing in drag until she finds true love. Arwen is the untouchable princess whose father sends her suitor on a knightly errand. Galadriel is the earth-mother.

These aren't even 19th-century stereotypes; these are medieval. The objection to this quibble is easily anticipated: If Tolkien was using old words, old settings, old epic, wouldn't modern women be out of place in the trilogy?

Yes, sure, maybe, but it completely undermines the argument that Tolkien is the author of the 20th century.

Shippey went to great lengths to demonstrate that Tolkien creatively infused the modern into the ancient and archetypal. He argues that hobbits are modern English bourgeois, placed into an ancient world to connect with readers and transform that world. If this is so, Tolkien did not go far enough to be the best expression of the 20th century.

Two threads dominated Western thinking in the 20th century: the question of evil and the underpinnings of hierarchy. When Virginia Woolf wrote about Shakespeare's sister in "A Room of One's Own," it was a forceful revision of a woman's "place" in literature and society. There were few female authors at the dawn of the 20th century, argued Woolf, because few women had the independent means to write. It was a point that reverberated throughout the century, as women made huge strides in independence (financial and otherwise) and added many new voices and perspectives to 20th century literature. And the new roles of women in society forced male authors to write outside of Victorian drawing-room relationships.

Tolkien didn't even try. And we can be glad of that, because he probably wouldn't have been any good at writing female characters. But without a modern female voice — maybe even a female hobbit — Tolkien cannot be the author of the 20th century.

— Benjamin Arnoldy (benjamin@csmonitor.com)