J.R.R. Tolkien Quotes

“The dominant literary mode of the twentieth century has been the fantastic. This may appear a surprising claim, which would not have seemed even remotely
conceivable at the start of the century and which is bound to encounter fierce resistance even now. However, when the time comes to look back at the century, it seems very likely that future literary historians, detached from the squabbles of our present, will see as its most representative and distinctive works books like J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and also George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and The Inheritors, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat’s Cradle, Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot-49 and Gravity’s Rainbow. The list could readily be extended, back to the late nineteenth century with H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr Moreau and The War of the Worlds, and up to writers currently active like Stephen R. Donaldson and George R.R. Martin. It could take in authors as different, not to say opposed, as Kingsley and Martin Amis, Anthony Burgess, Stephen King, Terry Pratchett, Don DeLillo, and Julian Barnes. By the end of the century, even authors deeply committed to the realist novel have often found themselves unable to resist the gravitational pull of the fantastic as a literary mode.

This is not the same, one should note, as fantasy as a literary genre – of the authors listed above, only four besides Tolkien would find their works regularly placed on the ‘fantasy’ shelves of bookshops, and ‘the fantastic’ includes many genres besides fantasy: allegory and parable, fairy-tale, horror and science fiction, modern ghost-story and medieval romance. Nevertheless, the point remains.
Those authors of the twentieth century who have spoken most powerfully to and for their contemporaries have for some reason found it necessary to use the metaphoric mode of fantasy, to write about worlds and creatures which we know do not exist, whether Tolkien’s ‘Middle-earth’, Orwell’s ‘Ingsoc’, the remote islands of Golding and Wells, or the Martians and Tralfa-madorians who burst into peaceful English or American suburbia in Wells and Vonnegut. A ready explanation for this phenomenon is of course that it represents a kind of literary disease, whose sufferers – the millions of readers of fantasy – should be scorned, pitied, or rehabilitated back to correct and proper taste. Commonly the disease is said to be ‘escapism’: readers and writers of fantasy are fleeing from reality. The problem with this is that so many of the originators of the later twentieth-century fantastic mode, including all four of those first mentioned above (Tolkien, Orwell, Golding, Vonnegut) are combat veterans, present at or at least deeply involved in the most traumatically significant events of the century, such as the Battle of the Somme (Tolkien), the bombing of Dresden (Vonnegut), the rise and early victory of fascism (Orwell). Nor can anyone say that they turned their backs on these events. Rather, they had to find some way of communicating and commenting on them. It is strange that this had, for some reason, in so many cases to involve fantasy as well as realism, but that is what has happened.”
― Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

“For Tolkien’s taste there were too few dragons in ancient literature, indeed by his count only three – the Miðgarðsorm or ‘Worm of Middle-earth’ which was to destroy the god Thor at Ragnarök, the Norse Doomsday; the dragon which Beowulf fights and kills at the cost of his own life; and Fafnir, who is killed by the Norse hero Sigurd.”
― Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

“Why could Tolkien not be more like Sir Thomas Malory, asked [Edwin] Muir, in the third Observer review of those cited above, and give us heroes and heroines like Lancelot and Guinevere, who ' knew temptation, were sometimes unfaithful to their vows,' were engagingly marked by adulterous passion? But T.H. White had already considered that paradigm, was indeed rewriting it at the same time as Tolkien in The Once and Future King; and he had seen the core of Malory's work not in romantic vice but in the human urge to murder. In White the poisonous adder that provokes the last disastrous battle is no adder but a harmless grass-snake, and the flash of the sword which brings on the two armies is not natural self-defense but natural blood-lust, creating a continuum from cruelty to animals to world wars and holocausts. Malory has to be rewritten to encompass a new view of evil.”
― Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

“The Boethian view is this: there is no such thing as evil. What people identify as evil is only the absence of good.”
― Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

“Muir’s complaint in the third review, the annoying one, was that the whole work was sub-adult in its painlessness: ‘The good boys, having fought a deadly battle, emerge at the end of it well, triumphant and happy, as boys would naturally expect to do.’ There is a simple reply to this, which is to say that Frodo at least does not end up well, or happy, and that he avoids any suggestion of triumph, seeming in the end incurably scarred, a ‘burnt-out case’. He is admittedly taken away to be healed of his wounds, like King Arthur, though that is not the way Muir put it. But there are other people, and creatures, and things, which cannot be taken away or healed. In fact it is much easier to make a case out for Tolkien as a pessimist than as a foolish or childish optimist; it is another of the qualities which mark him out from most of those who have imitated him.”
― Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

“It is a mistake just to blame everything on evil forces ‘out there’, the habit of xenophobes and popular journalists; just as much a mistake to luxuriate in self-analysis, the great skill of Tolkien’s contemporaries, the cosseted upper-class writers of the ‘modernist’ movement.”
― Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

“The Two Towers especially, and the first part of The Return of the King, have a structure reminiscent on a large scale of ‘The Council of Elrond’ on a small one. The word that describes the structure is ‘interlace’. Tolkien certainly knew the word, for it has become a commonplace of Beowulf-criticism, but he may not have liked it much: it is associated also with the structure of French prose romance, in which he took little interest. However, Tolkien certainly also knew that the Icelandic word for a short story is a Þáttr, literally a thread. One could say that several Þættir, or threads, twisted round each other, make up a saga; and Gandalf comes close to saying something like that when he says to Théoden, ‘There are children in your land who, out of the twisted threads of story, could pick the answer to your question’ (my emphasis). Tolkien may have felt that there had been all along a native version of the French technique of entrelacement, even if we no longer know the native word for it. But word, or no word, he was going to do it.”
― Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

“Tolkien, then, was a philologist before he was a mythologist, and a mythologist, at least in intention, before he ever became a writer of fantasy fiction. His beliefs about language and about mythology were sometimes original and sometimes extreme, but never irrational, and he was able to express them perfectly clearly. In the end he decided to express them not through abstract argument, but by demonstration, and the success of the demonstration has gone a long way to showing that he did often have a point: especially in his belief, which I share, that a taste for philology, for the history of language in all its forms, names and place-names included, is much more widespread in the population at large than educators and arbiters of taste like to think. In his 1959 ‘Valedictory Address to the University of Oxford’ (reprinted in Essays, pp. 224-40), Tolkien concluded that the problem lay not with the philologists nor with those they taught but with what he called ‘misologists’ – haters of the word. There would be no harm in them if they simply concluded language study was not for them, out of dullness or ignorance. But what he felt, Tolkien said, was:

"grievance that certain professional persons should suppose their dullness and ignorance to be a human norm; and anger when they have sought to impose the limitation of their minds upon younger minds, dissuading those with philological curiosity from their bent, encouraging those without this interest to believe that their lack marked them as minds of a superior order."

Behind this grievance and this anger was, of course, failure and defeat. It is now very hard to pursue a course of philology of the kind Tolkien would have approved in any British or American university. The misologists won, in the academic world; as did the realists, the modernists, the post-modernists, the despisers of fantasy.
But they lost outside the academic world. It is not long since I heard the commissioning editor of a major publishing house say, ‘Only fantasy is mass-market. Everything else is cult-fiction.’ (Reflective pause.) ‘That includes main-stream.’ He was defending his own buying strategy, and doubtless exaggerating, but there is a good deal of hard evidence to support him. Tolkien cried out to be heard, and we have still to find out what he was saying. There should be no doubt, though, that he found listeners, and that they found whatever he was saying worth their while.”
― Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

“No one, perhaps, is ever again going to emulate Tolkien in sheer quantity of effort, in building up the maps and the languages and the histories and the mythologies of one invented world, as no one is ever again going to have his philological resources to draw on.”
― Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

“He threatened the authority of the arbiters of taste, the critics, the educationalists, the literati. He was as educated as they were, but in a different school. He would not sign the unwritten Articles of the Church of Literary English. His work was from the start appreciated by a mass market, unlike Ulysses, first printed in a limited number of copies designedly to be sold to the wealthy and cultivated alone.”
― Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

“The speaker makes himself a mantle, a wand, a flag and a crown, and names himself ‘king of this land’, calling on the inhabitants to show themselves. Immediately the cloud comes, the country is disenchanted, becomes a land of beetles, spiders and puffballs, the speaker realizes he is old, ‘years were heavy upon my back’. The boat brings him back, he has nothing, and even the shell is now ‘silent and dead’, without even an echo.”
― Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

“the glimmering jewel-land with its unseen dancers and far-off music which haunted Tolkien’s imagination.”
― Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

“Tolkien wanted all his life to bring together the Christian religion in which he devoutly believed, and the relics of the pre-Christian beliefs of his ancestors embedded in the literature which he spent his professional life studying.”
― Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

“Tolkien remained keenly interested in the hidden roots of evil or of disaster, in the way that minor outbreaks of selfishness or carelessness mean more than they seem: snowballs leading to avalanches once more.”
― Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

“In his essay ‘On Fairy-Stories’ (first published in 1947), Tolkien remarked that the ‘oldest and deepest desire’ satisfied by fairy-stories is to tell tales of ‘the Great Escape: the Escape from Death’.”
― Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

“A main aim in Tolkien’s creations was always to ‘save the evidence’, to rescue his ancient sources from hasty modern accusations of vagueness or folly.”
― Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

“The flexibility of his many styles and languages; the resonance of the highest levels of these; the ability to reach out towards universal and mythic meaning, while remaining embedded in story: these are three powerful and largely unsuspected reasons for the continuing appeal of The Lord of the Rings.”
― Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

“one can see The Lord of the Rings carrying out its function as a mediator between, on the one hand, Christian belief and the literature of the pre-Christian heroic world to which Tolkien was so much attached; and on the other, between Christian belief and the post-Christian world in which Tolkien thought himself increasingly to be living.”
― Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

“In this whole only-slightly-qualified absence of religion the societies of Middle-earth are unlike any human societies we know about; and in this sense Middle-earth could rightly be called a ‘Never-never Land’. More politely, and more Catholically, one could say that Middle-earth is a sort of Limbo, in which the characters, like unbaptized innocents or the pagan philosophers of Dante, are counted as neither heathen nor Christian but something in between.”
― Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

“The ideas that on the one hand the Ring is a sort of psychic amplifier, magnifying the unconscious fears or selfishnesses of its owners, and on the other that it is a sentient creature with urges and powers of its own, are both present from the beginning, and correspond to the internal/Boethian and external/ Manichaean theories of evil.”
― Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

“all set up what seemed to be a deep-seated contradiction between Boethian and Manichaean opinions, between authority and experience, between evil as an absence (‘the Shadow’) and evil as a force (‘the Dark Power’). In The Lord of the Rings this contradiction drives much of the plot. It is expressed not only through the paradoxes of wraiths and shadows, but also through the Ring.”
― Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

“But more usually the suspicion is that people make themselves into wraiths. They accept the gifts of Sauron, quite likely with the intention of using them for some purpose which they identify as good. But then they start to cut corners, to eliminate opponents, to believe in some ‘cause’ which justifies everything they do. In the end the ‘cause’, or the habits they have acquired while working for the ‘cause’, destroys any moral sense and even any remaining humanity. The spectacle of the person ‘eaten up inside’ by devotion to some abstraction has been so familiar throughout the twentieth century as to make the idea of the wraith, and the wraithing-process, horribly recognizable, in a way non-fantastic.”
― Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

“Saruman, indeed, talks exactly like too many politicians. It is impossible to work out exactly what he means because of the abstract nature of his speech; in the end it is doubtful whether he understands himself.”
― Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

“The idea of anyone, however wise, persuading Sauron, would sound simply silly if it were said in so many words. No sillier, though, than the repeated conviction of many British intellectuals before and after this time that they could somehow get along with Stalin, or with Hitler.”
― Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

“The Hobbit itself had been published almost by accident, with a pupil who knew of its existence recommending it to a publisher’s representative who encouraged him to send it to Stanley Unwin, and Unwin sr. then giving the typescript to his eleven-year-old son Rayner to read and report on (see Bibliography, pp. 7-8). Once it had come out, had been acclaimed, and Unwin had not unreasonably asked for a sequel, Tolkien must have wondered what to do.”
― Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

“I argue that his continuing appeal rests not on mere charm or strangeness (though both are there and can again to some extent be explained), but on a deeply serious response to what will be seen in the end as the major issues of his century: the origin and nature of evil (an eternal issue, but one in Tolkien’s lifetime terribly re-focused); human existence in Middle-earth, without the support of divine Revelation; cultural relativity; and the corruptions and continuities of language. These are themes which no one can afford to despise, or need be ashamed of studying.”
― Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

“The argument that fantasy is intrinsically less truthful than realistic fiction could be extended to say that realistic fiction is intrinsically less truthful than biography. But we all (now) know that fiction allows a writer to express something, perhaps metaphorically or by analogy, which could not be expressed by history. The same argument should be extended to fantasy. That is surely why so many writers of the twentieth century, including the ones most closely concerned with real-world events, have had to write in the fantastic mode.”
― Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

“[Critics] were looking for a literary revelation, but when one came they denied it. It was not what they expected. Populist, not elitist. It did not provide that comfortable sense of superiority to the masses without which the English-speaking literary intellectual, it seems, cannot cope at all.”
― Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

“Many critics are very ready to express their anger, to call Tolkien childish and his readers retarded; they are less ready to explain or defend their judgements. The assumption seems to be that those of the right way of thinking (Susan Jeffreys’s literati) will know without being told, and those of the other party do not deserve debate: classic tactics of attempted marginalization.”
― Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

“Tolkien could bring a modern style into Middle-earth: Smaug talks it, for one, and so does Saruman. But he knew the implications of style, and of language, better and more professionally than almost anyone in the world. The flexibility of his many styles and languages; the resonance of the highest levels of these; the ability to reach out towards universal and mythic meaning, while remaining embedded in story: these are three powerful and largely unsuspected reasons for the continuing appeal of The Lord of the Rings.”
― Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century