Myth, by Tolkien

© Joe Mandala 1999

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien had an unremarkable birth. He was born in South
Africa, and lived his first few uneventful years there. He then took an unexciting
trip back to England where he was to stay. As a man, Tolkien was quite
unremarkable in appearance, wore generally unremarkable clothes, and led what
some would suspect was an unremarkable life. He in fact seemed to be the
archtypical Oxford don - gazing off into nothingness and mumbling about this or
that. There are a few things about this man, however, that are quite remarkable.
Somewhere along the way he developed an intense sense of perfectionism. This
was perhaps the single most important trait that Tolkien held in relation to his work
and writing.

It would not be right to say that Tolkien led an uneventful life. His mother and
father died when he was quite young, his mother's death being quite a blow. He
served in the Great War, and many of his friends were killed. He saw much of what
is wrong with us during the war. He married and had children, certainly an
important aspect in Tolkien's life. And, of course, he wrote one of the most popular
and acclaimed series of books that has ever been written.

It was Tolkien's perfectionism that whittled and worked at a great mass of

manuscript to produce The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, though this
perfectionism also showed in his exhaustive treatises on philology that was his
chosen life's work. His avowed love, however, lay with what became published as
The Silmarillion. So why did not Tolkien work first and foremost on this great
volume? It seems that his perfectionism would not allow it to go to press with any
misconceptions, mistakes, or malapropisms.

It is easier to understand Tolkien's obsession with perfecting this body of myth (for
myth it is) when one considers his goal. He wanted a mythology "for England;" one
with the scope of human emotion and thought that would rival and surpass the
fragments of any earlier mythology such as the Kalevala or the Eddas. Tolkien felt
that mythology is very much tied up in the identity of a culture, and that the loss of
such a cultural trait can only bring disillusionment and a kind of cultural identity
crisis that would result in the loss of any "national spirit." He saw myth as a way to
defend, perhaps, his beloved trees and countryside, for if everyone read myth and
knew myth as he did, would they not grow to love the countryside as reminiscent of
the great stories?

The Silmarillion was an attempt to create a secondary world in which truths

Tolkien believed and lived by could be couched in a universal manner. That is to
say, Tolkien believed that his myths must be imbued with a Christian ethic, though
any obvious or direct intrusion from this world would destroy the "willing
suspension of disbelief" that was necessary for the effect. The Myth, then, must be
comprehensive in its morals and very, very internally consistent. This is what held
up the creation of this volume. Tolkien reworked it, rewrote it, rephrased it, and did
everything he could, constantly, to perfect his epic. He was such a perfectionist that
it never was published in his lifetime (though he thought he would live longer than
he did).

The Silmarillion became a fluid, changing group of stories that represented the core
ideals of Tolkien's mythology. Perhaps this is the crux of the matter. The earlier
fragments of the ancient mythologies Tolkien used as references to a more
complete one were simply written down forms of an oral tradition. A tradition that
changed constantly as one poet would interpret the same story in his own unique
way. So Tolkien constantly changed his own stories, never satisfied with any one
"version" as the "correct" one, for in truth there could not be a single "correct"
version. Rather, the ideals and morals involved were what was central, and any
"fixing" of the stories into one form would take something from this - for then you
leave it open to examination on baser levels.

Like his own literary creation Mr. Niggle, Tolkien started by creating a story
around a moral - a myth, his "leaf." He then began to trace this myth back to
imaginary origins and created a few more on the way. As this work continued, the
myths grew into a mythology, but a static one, without the motion and verve that
was desired, without the bending limbs and rustling leaves. So he kept at it,
changing and amending so that in his own mind the stories had some motion - a
changing from earlier to later and back again. The mythology evolved within his
own creative aura. It could not, however, be written down this way, and so the
work of choosing the best of a line of stories began, but was not finished by him.
This is the perfectionism that stalled The Silmarillion and kept The Lord of the
Rings for seventeen years in the making. The written word cannot convey, perhaps,
the spoken and translated myth.

Luckily for us, our Niggle had a son that could complete his work. The entire
vision, of course, is left for Tolkien to contemplate in heaven as his creation Mr.
Niggle does, and for us to yearn toward as we catch our glimpses here and there.

"Before him stood the Tree, his Tree, finished. If you could say that of a Tree that
was alive, its leaves opening, its branches growing and bending in the wind that
Niggle had so often felt and guessed, and had so often failed to catch. He gazed at
the Tree, and slowly he lifted his arms and opened them wide. 'It's a gift!' he said."