Tolkien's Art: A 'Mythology for England'

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Tolkien's Art
Tolkien's Art.jpg
First paperback edition
AuthorJane Chance
CountryUnited Kingdom
LanguageEnglish
SubjectJ. R. R. Tolkien
GenreTolkien studies
PublisherMacmillan
Publication date
1979
Media typeHardcover (paperback, 1980)
Pages164
ISBN978-0-333-29034-7

Tolkien's Art: A 'Mythology for England' is a 1979 book of Tolkien scholarship by Jane Chance, writing then as Jane Chance Nitzsche.

Tolkien scholars including Tom Shippey and Verlyn Flieger, while noting some good points in the book, have roundly criticised Chance's approach, seeking to fit his writings into an allegorical pattern which in their view did not exist, and disagreeing with various points of detail.

Context[]

The English philologist J. R. R. Tolkien's published the bestselling children's book The Hobbit in 1937, and the bestselling fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings in 1954–1955.[1] His fantasy writings were severely criticised by the literary establishment. From the 1970s, Tolkien scholars including Paul H. Kocher, Jane Chance, and Tom Shippey began to mount a detailed defence of Tolkien.[2]

Jane Chance is an American scholar, from 1973 at Rice University, specializing in medieval English literature, gender studies, and Tolkien.[3]

Book[]

Publication history[]

Tolkien's Art: A 'Mythology for England' was first published by Macmillan in London in 1979. A paperback edition in Papermac appeared in 1980.[4] A revised edition was published in 2001.[5]

Synopsis[]

The first edition had 5 chapters. Chapter 1, "The Critic as Monster", looked at Tolkien's major essays "On Fairy-Stories" and "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics". Chapter 2, "The King Under the Mountain: Tolkien's Children's Story", dealt with The Hobbit. Chapter 3, "The Christian King: Tolkien's Fairy-Stories", covered "Leaf by Niggle" and "Smith of Wootton Major". Chapter 4, "The Germanic King: Tolkien's Medieval Parodies", looked at some minor works, namely "Lay of Autrou and Itroun", "The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth", "Imram", and Farmer Giles of Ham. Chapter 5, "The Lord of the Rings: Tolkien's Epic", studied that book. A final chapter, "Conclusion", looked briefly at The Silmarillion.[4]

The 2001 revised edition extended all the chapters in the light of Tolkien scholarship and of Christopher Tolkien's 12-volume The History of Middle-earth, but continued to describe The Silmarillion as "an appropriate coda to Tolkien's life".[5]

Reception[]

First edition[]

Reviewing the first edition, Shippey wrote that "a proper reading of Tolkien must depend on some sensitivity to the other literatures and views of literature he spent his time considering". In his view, Chance rightly set out to find the "seeds" of Tolkien's "mythology for England" in the medieval: and "regrettable that it fails". Shippey writes that Chance does not grasp Tolkien's valuing of the literal: that the Beowulf dragon is still a real dragon, "not yet Satan" – as it would have been a few centuries later. In Shippey's opinion, this "mistake" gives "too easy licence" to the critic to "the pursuit of meanings and the assimilation of such meanings to conventional piety". He gives as example Chance's assertion that Tolkien's talk of disliking allegory since he grew "old and wary enough to detect its presence" must be an allegory, and that his reference to age must mean he did not really dislike allegory: Shippey calls this a perfectly circular argument. He replies that Tolkien in fact definitely liked "strong fierce old men", such as Aragorn, Théoden King, Helm Hammerhand, and Gandalf; and that they represent "that unyielding courage to which Tolkien gave so high a value, and which he set at the heart of his mythology". He notes that Chance has no time for such old-fashioned values, and instead praises Bilbo's growth as a "type of the good king". He observes that Bilbo is nothing like a king, and that talk of "types" just muddies the waters. Shippey ends by saying that there are "some" good points in the book; Chance rightly sees "self-images of Tolkien" throughout his fiction; and she is right, too, in seeing Middle-earth as a balance between creativity and scholarship, "Germanic past and Christian present".[6]

Second edition[]

The Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger welcomed the "solid critical work" of the 2001 edition amidst the publicity for Peter Jackson's then-forthcoming films of The Lord of The Rings. She noted Chance's correct identification of the Finnish Kalevala as the trigger for Tolkien's legendarium, but found her general comparison with "mythological tales that often begin with creation" – as diverse as the Bible, Ovid's Metamorphoses, and the Mabinogion – misleading. Flieger agrees with Chance's comparison of Eru Ilúvatar with God, and the Valar with the Bible's angels, but writes that Chance "fails to note the equally important differences" where Tolkien intentionally "diverged from these models". Flieger writes that Chance was following Tolkien's intentions in calling the tales of Middle-earth "a mythology for England", but that she is not persuaded by Chance's argument that this applies to all of Tolkien's fiction. That would, Flieger writes, leave The Silmarillion only as a "'coda', as if it were an addendum to the principal composition", ignoring the lifetime's work that Tolkien put into that work, and from which The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings both emerged. Finally, she notes that Chance follows Tolkien's biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, throughout the book in describing Tolkien as "two people", one a dry scholar, the other an artist in words, supporting this with "sound scholarly evidence". Flieger disagrees with some "points of interpretation", writing that "Frodo, not Sam, is 'the real threat to Sauron'" and finds "Gollum's sacrifice of himself" an over-generous description of "that unhappy creature". She concludes that the book does explain "the scholarly roots of Tolkien's fiction", and how "those roots nourished the tree".[5]

The independent scholar Daniel J. Smitherman wrote that Chance had narrowed her scope to "the theme of kingship and its adversaries—of the heroes and the monsters". He notes that in Tolkien, both hero and monster sometimes appear directly, and are sometimes concealed. He finds Chance's 1979 demonstration that Tolkien used (medieval) English literature significant, but by the 2000s there was so much Tolkien scholarship, and it was based on so much more of Tolkien's writing than Chance had access to in the 1970s, that the revision seemed less than valuable; and that would have been true even if Chance's writing style had been better.[7]

Margaret Hiley, writing in Modern Fiction Studies, in passing calls Chance's Tolkien's Art and Shippey's The Road to Middle-earth "the best" of "many critical studies" of Tolkien's method in creating a new mythology.[8]

References[]

  1. ^ Carpenter, Humphrey (1978) [1977]. J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography. Unwin Paperbacks. pp. 111, 200, 266 and throughout. ISBN 978-0-04928-039-7.
  2. ^ Curry, Patrick (2020) [2014]. "The Critical Response to Tolkien's Fiction". In Lee, Stuart D. (ed.). A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien (PDF). Wiley Blackwell. pp. 369–388. ISBN 978-1-11965-602-9.
  3. ^ "Jane Chance, 1973–2011". Rice University Department of English. Archived from the original on December 21, 2016. Retrieved December 16, 2016.
  4. ^ a b Chance 1980.
  5. ^ a b c Flieger, Verlyn (2002). "[Review:] Tolkien's Art: A Mythology for England. Revised ed. by Jane Chance". Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts. 12 (4): 440–442. JSTOR 43308550.
  6. ^ Shippey, Tom (December 1980). "[Review:] Tolkien's Art: 'A Mythology for England' by Jane Chance Nitzsche". Notes and Queries. 27 (6): 570–572.
  7. ^ Smitherman, Daniel J. (2003). "Revised Editions of Tolkien Scholarship" (PDF). Rocky Mountain Review (Spring 2003): 109–111.
  8. ^ Hiley, Margaret (2004). "Stolen language, cosmic models: myth and mythology in Tolkien". Modern Fiction Studies. 50 (4): 838–860.

Sources[]

  • Chance, Jane (1980) [1979]. Tolkien's Art: 'A Mythology for England'. Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-333-29034-7.
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