First Brick in the Wall by Simon J. Cook

First Brick in the Wall

Working on J.R.R. Tolkien's 1936 allegory of the tower, its making and its reception, I've long struggled with the reality of magic. The destructive antics of the friends of the story, for example, can be framed purely in terms of their scholarly errors, but their folly suggests bewitchment by the old stones. This 'allegory' is almost a fairy-story, and teasing out what this means illuminates the intersections between Tolkien's art and his scholarship, the relationship between his conceptions of History and of Myth. I believe that in 1936 Tolkien perceived magic as actually present and operating in history.

But perhaps the most curious thing about Tolkien's allegory is its reception, in which a similar or related magic appears to be at work in subsequent generations. Basically, the late-Elizabethan consensus reading of the allegory does not so much read the allegory wrong as invent a new one, and for half a century everyone has been happy to go along with this alternative. Given that the original story is endlessly quoted prior to its remaking, I feel I am beholding the unwholesome effect of some profound magical spell.

To some considerable degree this appearance of magic is a trick of the written word in time. Basically, the late-Elizabethan consensus holds that scholarship is bad for your spiritual health and the study of history destructive to the aesthetic appreciation of myth. It is something of a mystery how the academics of the late 1970s and early 1980s drew this moral from an allegory that illustrates the precise opposite. But it is not so strange that this misreading has been received as orthodoxy by Tolkien fans because it gives a license to enjoy the stories free from the world of the classroom and lecture hall. Back in 1979, when Pink Floyd sang that the kids don't need no education, this seems to be what many people wished to hear. So back in the 1980s, I guess that Tolkien readers embraced Chance's reading of the allegory because it expressed what they already felt—but in retrospect it can seem as if everyone was bewitched after reading Chance and the other Tolkien scholars.

Yet I cannot explain away all my sense of magic. Tolkien's allegory reveals scholars of the past in a state of delusion in the face of a text, while the reception of the allegory reveals the same thing! What is going on here?

My previous post sampled the work of Tom Shippey, an Oxford-trained Germanic philologist. I am myself a product of the English academic world, have dedicated a few decades to studying its history, and recognize Shippey as representative of a post-WWII academic generation whose training occurred in the wake of a great clear-out of the theoretical concerns of the previous generation—now deemed inextricably bound up with empire, unsavory racial thought, and (by far the most despised) Anglican theology. The creed of this generation was 'no theory please, we're English', and they projected their own self-image of scholarship as manly engagement with facts (literary studies are for the ladies) onto the generation of their teachers, generating a false myth of England's academic past. For myself, at any rate, this is all too depressingly familiar and I see no magic here at all.

But Shippey was merely an unwilling under-laborer in the making of the late-Elizabethan consensus on the allegory of the tower. The real architect was Jane Chance Nitzsche, and she is a North American. I don't know much about the world on the other side of the ocean today, even less of its ivory towers in the 1970s. When I read 'The Critic as Monster,' the first chapter of Chance's pioneering monograph, Tolkien's Art: A Mythology for England (1979), my basic response is wtf? But on closer inspection I perceive something that looks like a magic spell being woven before my eyes, a potent contribution to the modern craft of fantasy.

Here is the single most influential commentary on Tolkien's allegory of Beowulf as a tower built near the sea. As I will elaborate below, we are in the second of five analyses of elements of Tolkien's 'Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics' (1936) that (only) together unmask the 'critics' of the title as 'monsters'. Here, then, is the first bit of magic: a revelation that the critics are Dwarves, which (somehow) is one stage of a demonstration that the critics are not Dwarves, but monsters:

The conflict centres now on a tower of old stones taken from a house of his father which the Man has built to 'look out upon the sea'—that is, figuratively to see better or to gain perspective or wisdom. But the friends and descendants view the tower differently: not interested in far-sightedness and perceptivity they refuse even to climb the steps and instead gaze myopically at their old stones. Wishing 'to look for hidden carvings' or to seek 'a deposit of coal under the soil,' they seem as materialistic and short-sighted as the dwarves of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Their myopia mirrors their lack of spirituality: and they fulfil their destructive, selfish inclinations by pushing over the tower, digging under its soil, and generally disregarding the moral and legal rights of the tower-builder. The parable intimates that modern critics (so-called 'Friends') and even modern poets ('Descendants') prefer discovery of its sources and influences (the stone blocks, hidden carvings and coal deposits) to enjoyment and use of the whole poem (tower) in order to attain insight about life (to climb its steps and view the sea). Their 'sensible' source-hunting overwhelms the tower-builder's delight in the 'nonsensical tower', as the friends term it. Unfortunately, he remains wholly alone, his friends more unkind than any enemies, his descendants more distant and alien than any strangers.¹

Here is the moment that a second act starring Tolkien's academic friends and colleagues becomes some weird moral parable about the evils of education. A cloud of unknowing surrounds the identities of the friends and descendants. The chief descendants of the allegory, Ker and Chambers, will soon be named the ringleaders of the riot of friends that topples the tower, lords of the monsters. Chance it was who first merged the friends and descendants to remake the structure of the allegory, which no longer contrasts two distinct groups of flesh and blood academics but gives us rather the single abstraction 'Critic = Historical Scholar = Enemy of Art = Monster'. Yet her analysis reveals these 'critics' not as monsters but Dwarves.

Observe how identifying all the academics as 'friends' empties the category of 'descendant'. With no textual justification whatsoever, Chance identifies the descendants as 'modern poets'. The very notion of 'descent' made the academics of those days nervous, and as with Shippey the entire labor of misapprehension appears to be undertaken because they sniff racial ideas and antisemitism but will not say so outright. Chance hides from the racial connotations of 'descent' but points to antisemitism with her Dwarves, whose unspiritual and selfish materialism invokes medieval Christian imagery of the Jews—an identification recognizable to her fellow academics, if not the rest of us who might buy her book.

Nobody wanted to mention the war, but these academics had a shrewd sense that Tolkien in 1936 was touching on just that spirit of Northern mythology exhibited in those days in Berlin. Hold on a moment. Obviously he was touching on this spirit—the friends destroy the Anglo-Saxon tower under the influence of the old stones of Germanic tradition, is this not a hint? Nobody in November 1936 could attend, let alone deliver, a lecture on the Old English heroic story of Beowulf who battled monsters in the named lands of the North without one eye on the gathering storm clouds on the horizon. The challenge we face today is the historical one of teasing out what Tolkien was saying in the face of that already darkening sky (see my earlier article 1936). But what the foundational texts of Tolkien scholarship from 1979 onwards display is a desperate flight of escape from this Interwar historical reality. Shippey eviscerates History by imposition of an academic disciplinary gaze, making 1936 year zero in the history of Beowulf criticism while events in Madrid, Moscow, Berlin—or, for that matter, the Battle of Cable Street in London that October—disappear from view. Chance's solution was more imaginative.

As I said, Chance is from a land that is strange to me, a foreign country. The best I can do here is suggest that she was doing fanfiction of that kind that keeps the surface elements but remakes the underlying vision in a fashion deemed more appropriate for a new day and age. The only problem is that she clearly believed she was unveiling literary truth, and has been received as so doing. Still, once viewed as scholarly fiction (a subcategory of fanfiction) the craft is impressive! Her chapter 'The Monster as Critic' is an astonishing display of imaginative reconstruction, whereby Tolkien's original fantasy is trashed and another built in its place from the debris.

We begin with the above allegory of the tower, in which Chance hides the descendants while suggesting that the man at the top of his tower is watching out for the conversion of the Jews. Now let me state the obvious: I have in my hand no palantír. So I'm doing what I do every time I engage with another human being and taking a best guess. So far as I can make out, Chance did not like what her initial analysis suggested, and so called upon psychoanalysis: selecting four additional metaphorical elements of the 1936 essay, she built a stairway to her kind of heaven, a fantasy fit for the 1970s in which art is freedom and classroom education a recipe for fascism (once again, cf. the Pink Floyd song). Her passage from troubling analysis to a reading fit for 1979 arrives at the stunning conclusion that between the lines of Tolkien's lecture is an 'implicit fantasy': 

the 'monster' is the critic-scholar who prefers history and philology to art-for-art's-sake, reflecting by his choice a ratiocination sterile, stale, and dead, in contrast to the alive and joyful imagination of the artist-hero with whom Tolkien identifies.²

Let's reflect on what we are being asked to believe. We are to picture Tolkien in London on that Wednesday long ago, addressing the distinguished fellows of the British Academy for the Promotion of Historical, Philosophical, and Philological Studies, and telling them—if only between the lines—that they are monsters. A stunningly hypocritical accusation from the Oxford Professor of Anglo-Saxon.³

Chance's charge of hypocrisy is but the other side of her rejection of history. She gives the first account of Tolkien as a "divided self"—at work in the academy the man was Gollum, a self-hating scholar, but at home he was Frodo, the free artist. Chance replaces History with Psychoanalysis and by 'fantasy' she means a reconciliation of contradictory wishes achieved only in the imagination. So was any sense of history vanished from Tolkien's Middle-earth.

This is the fantasy of Chance, not of Tolkien. Her method is ruinous. The fourth 'exemplum', for example, is Tolkien's passing observation that, in his criticism of Beowulf, R.W. Chambers gives battle on dubious ground, from which is extracted that part of this fantasy in which Tolkien the artist must battle the scholar-monsters. What kind of statistical sampling method is this? The lecture contains dozens of metaphors, many glittering, and one could no doubt extract any fantasy one wished for by an astute selection of five.

Observe what happens if we take another metaphor. Tolkien justifies his criticism of the criticism of the great W.P. Ker by suggesting that sometimes 'the dwarf on the spot' can point out something 'missed by the travelling giant'.⁴ Dwarves may go on quests, but the Dwarf on the spot is already on the ground. What does a Dwarf do on the ground? He digs and he quarries and he mines, and then fashions a new precious stone of his own, obviously. With this choice metaphor we unveil an 'implicit fantasy' of the story of the tower as a new stone forged on the debris left by the destructive friends.

The marvel of Chance's—utterly subjective—choice of metaphor is how deftly and yet fantastically it transpires to hide just what we should be looking at, slapping a warning on the stones that we should be seeing before our eyes. Inspecting the stones of Beowulf, gazing into their curious surfaces, worked by ancient hands in the long ago and then reworked and polished and positioned carefully by the Anglo-Saxon poet in a pattern of profound significance, is declared an aesthetic sin, a crime against art. After this, no self-respecting friend of Tolkien would dare approach any story by way of its stones, most especially not this one. And here is the magic woven by Chance. Because investigating with Tolkien the old stones used by the Anglo-Saxon poet is the only way to make sense of the 1936 allegory, the fairy-stone fashioned by the Dwarf on the spot.

Such was the spirit of the age. I was eleven years old back in 1979, and obviously have no memory of the publication of Tolkien's Art. But I am by now intimately acquainted with its thesis because it has been dropped on my head by scholarly Tolkien fans on online forums over and over again down the years. To stand up and say otherwise is to court fury and scorn, and to politely point out that others are spouting nonsense leads only to a suspension of your user account.

Most of my sense of magic is no doubt a reflection of my own ignorance as to the context in which Chance constructed her Cold War fantasy. But Chance did not merely eviscerate a sense of history, as did Shippey, she declared history the Enemy. Shippey mistakes his disciplinary gaze for a sense of history, but Chance throws a sense of history to the dogs. Chance proposed that the key to reading Tolkien was to open our hearts to his (supposed) rejection of historical scholarship, and nobody challenged her! How could this be? How has a consensus forged out of this balderdash endured for half a century? I thought you couldn't fool all the people all of the time?

My answers are incomplete. What insights I have are gleaned from Tolkien's allegory, which contains at its heart an image of a communication between author and readers separated in time. The second act shows how strange things happen in the transmission, which the contrast of friends with descendants frames in terms of partial reception. Each group glimpses something in the old poem that the other group overlooks. The deluded friends are at least touching the magic that the descendants don't see. The errors of the critics are rooted in their own presuppositions, but the error itself is a fusion that works up some genuine insight. Errors of reception are instructive, and the wilder the error the more instructive.

Tolkien's Art is pretty wild. I don't pretend to have reached the roots of the mischief that besets Tolkien scholarship to this day. But in attempting to circle the magic I'll conclude with two genuine if partial insights that we can discern in Chance's reading of the 1936 allegory of the tower. First, consider again the denigration of the 'critics' of the allegory:

... not interested in far-sightedness and perceptivity they refuse even to climb the steps and instead gaze myopically at their old stones.⁵

The seemingly innocent invocation of a seeing stone in the ideal of far-sightedness associated with the view from the tower is remarkable (palantir = 'Far-seer' in Elvish Quenya, 'those that watch from afar').⁶ Observe how restructuring the allegory around one crowd of monstrous academics prompts the introduction of optical imagery to describe their sins, with pedantic scholarship rendered as myopic obsession with detail in contrast to the wide vista of art seen from the tower. Breaking the structure of the story, Chance appears to bring to light its underlying visual unity, pointing (despite herself) to the implicit idea that the individual stones no less than the tower provide a window onto another world. All that is needed is an appreciation of the different kinds of view one might wish to see from the top of a tower, or within the mysterious depths of a palantír. Looking only out to sea is all very well, but if we turn our gaze around and look inland, we may open our eyes to wonder in a myriad other views, focusing, for example, on some awesomely detailed hidden carvings.

Chance might have seen the whole thing had she recognized that the view from the tower offers a fantastic solution to those of us friends who are optically-challenged, and require some education before we can ourselves (safely) use the individual stones as enchanted microscopes and telescopes of time. Still, we require a sure guide even to climb this tower to the top of the staircase, and so read Beowulf with a feel for the background of lost stories glimpsed in the individual stones, which our guide shows us may be viewed in close detail, or set against vast vistas of myth and legend.

Secondly, Dwarves? Spot on. The antics of the friends are indeed strangely reminiscent of thirteen Dwarves in a Hobbit-hole one Wednesday long ago. But one characteristic of the Tolkien scholarship of this pioneering era is that it too often rests on a first insight—today, we have learned that what to us appears as great insight was usually for Tolkien but a first step. What someone should have pointed out to Chance (if they did, I never read it) is that the spirit of the friends, as also the descendants, is invoked even more acutely outside this Hobbit-hole in the sequel, at the long-expected party of Bilbo Baggins—just so long as we recognize it as a sequel in which the host now turns the tables on the guests. Tolkien was turning a story over in his mind and setting down distinctive variations, and it is worth noting the chronology of composition as we can now set it down: 'Unexpected Party' (1930), allegory of the rock garden (1933), allegory of the tower (1936), 'A Long-expected Party' (1937).

Chance correctly perceived that the 'fantasy' of the 1936 allegory is of the same kind of stuff as the fantasies of the two Hobbit parties. But she must have got sidetracked on beards or something. Dwarves may be the original guests in the Hobbit-hole, but once Tolkien had applied the party-story to Beowulf criticism, the guests become Hobbits. So, for example, if you wish to consider how a good friend becomes caught up in a destructive mob of scholars that destroys a tower, it may help to observe close up and in detail, within the mysterious depths of a Seeing Stone in your own hands, one foolish individual on his own with a stone in his hands. In this case, Peregrin Took and the palantír is a helpful scene to call to mind.

Works Cited

1. Jane Chance Nitzsche, Tolkien's Art: A Mythology for England (London: Macmillan: 1979), 11-12.
2. Ibid., 5.
3. "I fear you may be right that the search for the sources of The Lord of the Rings is going to occupy academics for a generation or two. I wish this need not be so. To my mind it is the particular use in a particular situation of any motive, whether invented, deliberately borrowed, or unconsciously remembered that is the most interesting thing to consider." The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, "337 From a letter to 'Mr Wrigley'."
4. "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics," 9-10.
5. Chance, Tolkien's Art, 11.
6. The Silmarillion, "Index of Names."