Making, Knowing and Judging
di W. H. Auden
Clarendon Press, Oxford
1° ed. 1956
Brossura
Questo libretto contiene la Lettura inaugurale che Wystan Hugh Auden,
professore di Poesia, tenne all’Università di Oxford l’11 giugno 1956. Un
conferenza alla quale prese parte lo stesso Tolkien, come confermò Rachel Trickett, fellow e tutor al St Hugh’s College. Durante la Lettura, così come riportato nel testo a pagina 13, Auden fece un
riferimento a Tolkien e al suo modo d’insegnare:
I remember one I attended, delivered by Professor Tolkien. I do not remember a single word he said but at a certain point he recited, and magnificently, a long passage of Beowulf. I was spellbound. This poetry, I knew was going to be my dish. I became willing, therefore, to work at Anglo-Saxon and Middle English poetry have been one of my stronger, most lasting influences.
È risaputa l’ammirazione che Auden
nutriva per Tolkien e le sue opere. Il 31 ottobre 1954, all’uscita di The Fellowship of the Ring scrisse la
recensione sul «The New York Times», The Hero Is a Hobbit (si riporta a fondo pagina). Il 22
gennaio 1956, con l’uscita di The Return
of the King, sempre sullo stesso quotidiano, firmò la recensione At
the End of the Quest, Victory (si riporta a fondo pagina). Mentre nel 1962, scrisse A Short Ode to a Philologist pubblicato
in English
and Medieval Studies Presented to J.R.R. Tolkien on the Occasion of his
Seventieth Birthday. Nello stesso anno, sul numero IV di «The
Texas Quarterly», scrisse The Quest Hero,
ristampato più volte e nel 1968, su «Critical Quarterly», volume 10, Good and Evil in The Lord of the Rings.
Il rapporto tra Auden e Tolkien fu
molto stretto e numeroso lo scambio epistolare anche su aspetti legati al Signore degli Anelli come il rapporto
tra Aragorn e Arwen, così come emerso in una lettera
inedita del 2014.
The Hero Is a Hobbit
Seventeen years ago there appeared, without any fanfare, a book called
"The Hobbit" which, in my opinion, is one of the best children's
stories of this century. In "The Fellowship of the Ring," which is
the first volume of a trilogy, J. R. R. Tolkien continues the imaginative
history of the imaginary world to which he introduced us in his earlier book
but in a manner suited to adults, to those, that is, between the ages of 12 and
70. For anyone who likes the genre to which it belongs, the Heroic Quest, I
cannot imagine a more wonderful Christmas present. All Quests are concerned
with some numinous Object, the Waters of Life, the Grail, buried treasure etc.;
normally this is a good Object which it is the Hero's task to find or to rescue
from the Enemy, but the Ring of Mr. Tolkien's story was made by the Enemy and
is so dangerous that even the good cannot use it without being corrupted.
The Enemy believed that it had been lost forever, but he has just
discovered that it has come providentially into the hands of the Hero and is
devoting all his demonic powers to its recovery, which would give him the
lordship of the world. The only way to make sure of his defeat is to destroy
the Ring, but this can only be done in one way and in one place which lies in
the heart of the country; the task of the Hero, therefore, is to get the Ring
to the place of its unmaking without getting caught.
The hero, Frodo Baggins, belongs to a race of beings called hobbits, who
may be only three feet high; have hairy feet and prefer to live in underground
houses, but in their thinking and sensibility resemble very closely those
arcadian rustics who inhabit so many British detective stories. I think some
readers may find the opening chapter a little shy-making, nut they must not let
themselves be put off, for, once the story gets moving, this initial archness
disappears.
For over a thousand years the hobbits have been living a peaceful
existence in a fertile district called the Shire, incurious about the world
outside. Actually, the latter is rather sinister; towns have fallen to ruins,
roads into disrepair, fertile fields have returned to wilderness, wild beasts
and evil beings on the prowl, and travel is difficult and dangerous. In
addition to the Hobbits, there are Elves who are wise and good, Dwarves who are
skillful and good on the whole, and Men, some warriors, some wizards, who are
good or bad. The present incarnation of the Enemy is Sauron, Lord of Barad-Dur,
the Dark Tower in the Land of Mordor. Assisting him are the Orcs, wolves and
other horrid creatures and, of course, such men as his power attracts or
overawes. Landscape, climate and atmosphere are northern, reminiscent of the
Icelandic sagas.
The first thing that one asks is that the adventure should be various
and exciting; in this respect Mr. Tolkien's invention is unflagging, and, on
the primitive level of wanting to know what happens next, "The Fellowship
of the Ring" is at least as good as "The Thirty-Nine Steps." Of
any imaginary world the reader demands that it seem real, and the standard of
realism demanded today is much stricter than in the time, say, of Malory. Mr.
Tolkien is fortunate in possessing an amazing gift for naming and a wonderfully
exact eye for description; by the time one has finished his book one knows the
histories of Hobbits, Elves, Dwarves and the landscape they inhabit as well as
one knows one's own childhood.
Lastly, if one is to take a tale of this kind seriously, one must feel
that, however superficially unlike the world we live in its characters and
events may be, it nevertheless holds up the mirror to the only nature we know,
our own; in this, too, Mr. Tolkien has succeeded superbly, and what happened in
the year of the Shire 1418 in the Third Age of Middle Earth is not only
fascinating in A. D. 1954 but also a warning and an inspiration. No fiction I
have read in the last five years has given me more joy than "The
Fellowship of the Ring."
Mr. Auden's most recent poetical work is "Nones."
At the End of the
Quest, Victory
'In "The Return of the King," Frodo Baggins fulfills his
Quest, the realm of Sauron is ended forever, the Third Age is over and J. R. R.
Tolkien's trilogy "The Lord of the Rings" complete. I rarely remember
a book about which I have had such violent arguments. Nobody seems to have a
moderate opinion: either, like myself, people find it a masterpiece of its
genre or they cannot abide it, and among the hostile there are some, I must
confess, for whose literary judgment I have great respect. A few of these may
have been put off by the first forty pages of the first chapter of the first
volume in which the daily life of the hobbits is described; this is light
comedy and light comedy is not Mr. Tolkien's forte. In most cases, however, the
objection must go far deeper. I can only suppose that some people object to
Heroic Quests and Imaginary Worlds on principle; such, they feel, cannot be
anything but light "escapist" reading. That a man like Mr. Tolkien,
the English philologist who teaches at Oxford, should lavish such incredible
pains upon a genre which is, for them, trifling by definition, is, therefore,
very shocking.
The difficulty in presenting a complete picture of reality lies in the
gulf between the subjectively real, a man's experience of his own existence,
and the objectively real, his experience of the lives of others and the world
about him. Life, as I experience it in my own person, is primarily a continuous
succession of choices between alternatives, made for a short-term or long-term
purpose; the actions I take, that is to say, are less significant to me than
the conflicts of motives, temptations, doubts in which they originate. Further,
my subjective experience of time is not of a cyclical motion outside myself but
of an irreversible history of unique moments which are made by my decisions.
For objectifying this experience, the natural image is that of a journey
with a purpose, beset by dangerous hazards and obstacles, some merely
difficult, others actively hostile. But when I observe my fellow-men, such an
image seems false. I can see, for example, that only the rich and those on
vacation can take journeys; most men, most of the time must work in one place.
I cannot observe them making choices, only the actions they take and, if
I know someone well, I can usually predict correctly how he will act in a given
situation. I observe, all too often, men in conflict with each other, wars and
hatreds, but seldom, if ever, a clear-cut issue between Good on the one side
and Evil on the other, though I also observe that both sides usually describe
it as such. If then, I try to describe what I see as if I were an impersonal
camera, I shall produce not a Quest, but a "naturalistic" document.
Both extremes, of course, falsify life. There are medieval Quests which
deserve the criticism made by Erich Auerbach in his book "Mimesis":
"The world of knightly proving is a world of adventure. It not only
contains a practically uninterrupted series of adventures; more specifically,
it contains nothing but the requisites of adventure... Except feats of arms and
love, nothing occurs in the courtly world-and even these two are of a special
sort: they are not occurrences or emotions which can be absent for a time; they
are permanently connected with the person of the perfect knight, they are part
of his definition, so that he cannot for one moment be without adventure in
arms nor for one moment without amorous entanglement... His exploits are feats
of arms, not 'war,' for they are feats accomplished at random which do not fit
into any politically purposive pattern."
And there are contemporary "thrillers" in which the
identification of hero and villain with contemporary politics is depressingly
obvious. On the other hand, there are naturalistic novels in which the
characters are the mere puppets of Fate, or rather, of the author who, from
some mysterious point of freedom, contemplates the workings of Fate.
If, as I believe, Mr. Tolkien has succeeded more completely than any
previous writer in this genre in using the traditional properties of the Quest,
the heroic journey, the Numinous Object, the conflict between Good and Evil
while at the same time satisfying our sense of historical and social reality,
it should be possible to show how he has succeeded. To begin with, no previous
writer has, to my knowledge, created an imaginary world and a feigned history
in such detail. By the time the reader has finished the trilogy, including the
appendices to this last volume, he knows as much about Tolkien's Middle Earth,
its landscape, its fauna and flora, its peoples, their languages, their
history, their cultural habits, as, outside his special field, he knows about the
actual world.
Mr. Tolkien's world may not be the same as our own: it includes, for
example, elves, beings who know good and evil but have not fallen, and, though
not physically indestructible, do not suffer natural death. It is afflicted by
Sauron, an incarnate of absolute evil, and creatures like Shelob, the monster
spider, or the orcs who are corrupt past hope of redemption. But it is a world
of intelligible law, not mere wish; the reader's sense of the credible is never
violated.
Even the One Ring, the absolute physical and psychological weapon which
must corrupt any who dares to use it, is a perfectly plausible hypothesis from
which the political duty to destroy it which motivates Frodo's quest logically
follows.
To present the conflict between Good and Evil as a war in which the good
side is ultimately victorious is a ticklish business. Our historical experience
tells us that physical power and, to a large extent, mental power are morally
neutral and effectively real: wars are won by the stronger side, just or
unjust. At the same time most of us believe that the essence of the Good is
love and freedom so that Good cannot impose itself by force without ceasing to
be good.
The battles in the Apocalypse and "Paradise Lost," for
example, are hard to stomach because of the conjunction of two incompatible
notions of Deity, of a God of Love who creates free beings who can reject his
love and of a God of absolute Power whom none can withstand. Mr. Tolkien is not
as great a writer as Milton, but in this matter he has succeeded where Milton
failed. As readers of the preceding volumes will remember, the situation in the
War of the Ring is as follows: Chance, or Providence, has put the Ring in the
hands of the representatives of Good, Elrond, Gandalf, Aragorn. By using it
they could destroy Sauron, the incarnation of evil, but at the cost of becoming
his successor. If Sauron recovers the Ring, his victory will be immediate and
complete, but even without it his power is greater than any his enemies can
bring against him, so that, unless Frodo succeeds in destroying the Ring,
Sauron must win.
Evil, that is, has every advantage but one-it is inferior in
imagination. Good can imagine the possibility of becoming evil-hence the
refusal of Gandalf and Aragorn to use the Ring-but Evil, defiantly chosen, can
no longer imagine anything but itself. Sauron cannot imagine any motives except
lust for domination and fear so that, when he has learned that his enemies have
the Ring, the thought that they might try to destroy it never enters his head,
and his eye is kept toward Gondor and away from Mordor and the Mount of Doom.
Further, his worship of power is accompanied, as it must be, by anger
and a lust for cruelty: learning of Saruman's attempt to steal the Ring for
himself, Sauron is so preoccupied with wrath that for two crucial days he pays
no attention to a report of spies on the stairs of Cirith Ungol, and when
Pippin is foolish enough to look in the palantir of Orthanc, Sauron could have
learned all about the Quest. His wish to capture Pippin and torture the truth
from him makes him miss his precious opportunity.
The demands made on the writer's powers in an epic as long as "The
Lord of the Rings" are enormous and increase as the tale proceeds-the
battles have to get more spectacular, the situations more critical, the
adventures more thrilling-but I can only say that Mr. Tolkien has proved equal
to them. From the appendices readers will get tantalizing glimpses of the First
and Second Ages. The legends of these are, I understand, already written and I
hope that, as soon as the publishers have seen "The Lord of the
Rings" into a paper-back edition, they will not keep Mr. Tolkien's growing
army of fans waiting too long.
Mr. Auden is the author of "Nones" and "The Shield of Achilles"
among other volumes of verse.'
— W.H. Auden, January 22, 1956
