1. About Literary Genres
Also - and here I hope I shall not sound absurd - I was from early days grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country; it had no stories of its own (bound up with his tongue and soil), not of the quality that I sought, and found (as an ingredient) in legends of other lands. There was Greek, and Celtic, and Romance, Germanic, Scandinavian, and Finnish (which greatly affected me); but nothing English, save impoverished chap-book stuff. Of course there was and is all the Arthurian world, but powerful as it is, it is imperfectly naturalized, associated with the soil of Britain but not with English; and does not replace what I felt to be missing. For one thing its 'faerie' is too lavish, and fantastical, incoherent and repetitive. For another and more important thing: it is involved in, and explicitly contains the Christian religion. For reasons which I will not elaborate, that seems to me fatal. Myth and fairy-story must, as all art, reflect and contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth (or error), but not explicit, not in the known form of the primary 'real' world. (I am speaking, of course, of our present situation, not of ancient pagan, pre-Christian days. And I will not repeat what I tried to say in my essay, that you read.)
Tolkien & Carpenter, The Letters of Tolkien, 144
Regarding literature as a whole, we could say that J. R. R. Tolkien acted sort of a compiler, an updater and consequently an innovator of fantasy genres. He was the man who brought back myth into modern culture and updated it so it could became a new genre but still keeping the nature of true myth. He could be said to be the starter/source for the so-called "sword and sorcery" literature, for unlike Jules Verne (as it has been explained in this essay) he was not strictly into science-fiction. Though one of his characters, Saruman, used machines, they were too primitive if we compared them with the technological devices introduced and presented by other authors, such as Orwell or Verne himself. Tolkien also was a little afar from traditional adventure and historical novel. He kept some traces from Stevenson and Scott as he included recognisable elements from History, though he never directly mentioned any actual place nor person, keeping it more lyrical. No trace from mystery novels, mostly because they were too modern and 'scientific' to appear in a fantastic universe. And concerning horror literature, the most noticeable resemblance to another author, as we have seen in part II of this essay, is the character of Gollum/Sméagol, the deformed schizophrenic hobbit with a double personality in the likes of Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll. Of course both Gollum and Sméagol are proven to be equally selfish and evil, and none of them is a balance for the other, unlike Jekyll and Hyde who are exact counterparts. The common point is the mutual interest between all four in keeping their other side alive.
In addition, whether Tolkien was consciously or unconsciously willing (or not) to include other mythological sources than those he declared (mostly the Bible, the Nordic Eddas and Beowulf), displayed and explained by all five Tolkien's scholars and specialists quoted above (Shippey, Pearce, Garth, Dickerson and Jones) he had by force to get through some 'undeclared' ones if he wanted to include others. For instance, although he rejected King Arthur and chivalry literature, if he wanted to add a solemn hero to a text understandable not only in England but in Western Europe, Tolkien had to use familiar sources for he couldn't re-describe or re-write a whole literary genre in a single book and in just eleven years (obviously a literary genre could have developed in that period, but with the presence of more authors to increase the bulk) Of course Tolkien gave birth to a new way of writing, a new style within the genre of fantasy fiction, That new style included very old genres such as myth, epic tragedy, chivalry literature and fairy-tale, but re-told in such a way that both readers and critics felt it was at least innovative (despite their opinion on whether it was a more or less complete work).
Whatever the case was, Tolkien himself declared the possibility to have 'slipped' some extra nuances because of his personal implication with the story:
As for 'message': I have none really, if by that is meant the conscious purpose in writing The Lord of the Rings, of preaching, or of delivering myself of a vision of truth specially revealed to me! I was primarily writing an exciting story in an atmosphere and background such as I find personally attractive. But in such a process inevitably one's own taste, ideas and beliefs get taken up.
Tolkien & Carpenter, The Letters of Tolkien, 267
Finally, it is of course undeniable that a "re-build from ruins" requires the re-visitation of the whole old materials. If Tolkien wanted to be sure his mythology for England was complete, he had to be aware of almost every piece of literature written in or referring to England and quote, mention, retell or include it in any way, so everybody knew what was originally wrong and what does the "fix" consist of. The fact that readers recognised facts and characters from culture should have been a relief for Tolkien as an author if what he wanted was to create something he thought to be so weak and broken, for he was such a fortunate author that he might have enjoyed one of the most imaginative and at the same time literate readers ever. If readers knew what they were being told, and some could also be able to become aware of what was Tolkien's aim, they may have recognised both the old version and the new picture. And that is exactly the problem of those Tolkien's critics claiming the book to be a labyrinthic experiment between philology and literature. Not enough or qualitative contents about language to be linguistics, and a plot not linear enough to be a novel.
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© Ignacio Pascual Mondéjar, 2006
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