Tolkien and true tradition

Jackson Crawford’s video on The Hammer and the Cross yesterday morning got me leafing back through my Tom Shippey, and having recently reread the Nibelungenlied got me looking for it in the index of The Road to Middle Earth. The most interesting reference to the poem in this particular book came in an appendix, “Tolkien’s Sources: The True Tradition.”

Shippey begins with a caveat:

Tolkien himself did not approve of the academic search for ‘sources’. He thought it tended to distract attention from the work of art itself, and to undervalue the artist by the suggestion that he had ‘got it all’ from somewhere else.

This is exactly right. Understanding the sources, inspirations, and influences behind a work of literature can be instructive, but the Quellenforschung too easily turns from an inquiry into the past of a living specimen to the dismemberment of a corpse. The once-living creature—not to mention its creator—is often lost from sight in the process.

Before turning to the sources, inspirations, and influences of Tolkien’s work, Shippey elaborates upon the difference in Tolkien’s attitude toward the use of sources for modern retellings and the way he used them for that work:

He was also very quick to detect the bogus and the anachronistic, which is why I use the phrase ‘true tradition’. Tolkien was irritated all his life by modern attempts to rewrite or interpret old material, almost all of which he thought led to failures of tone and spirit. Wagner is the most obvious example. People were always connecting The Lord of the Rings with Der Ring des Nibelungen, and Tolkien did not like it. ‘Both rings were round’, he snarled, ‘and there the resemblance ceases’ (Letters, p. 306). This is not entirely true. The motifs of the riddle-contest, the cleansing fire, the broken weapon preserved for an heir, all occur in both works, as of course does the theme of ‘the lord of the Ring as the slave of the Ring’, des Ringes Herr als des Ringes Knecht. But what upset Tolkien was the fact that Wagner was working, at second-hand, from material which he knew at first-hand, primarily the heroic poems of the Elder Edda and the later Middle High German Nibelungenlied. Once again he saw difference where other people saw similarity. Wagner was one of several authors with whom Tolkien had a relationship of intimate dislike: Shakespeare, Spenser, George MacDonald, Hans Christian Andersen. All, he thought, had got something very important not quite right. It is especially necessary, then, for followers of Tolkien to pick out the true from the heretical, and to avoid snatching at surface similarities.

This is a remarkably insightful passage, and helped give me the language for something I’ve felt within myself for many years: that same irritation with modern reinterpretations that “get something important not quite right,” that are “failures of tone and spirit.” This might as well be the thesis statement, for example, of my review of The Green Knight a year ago, and it also helps me understand why despite my love for Tolkien I’ve hardly ever liked any other fantasy fiction I’ve read. The few I have—The Lord of the Rings, The Prydain Chronicles—are animated by at least something of a discernible “true tradition.” The ones I have not—A Song of Ice and Fire, The Wheel of Time—have the trappings but not the tradition, the form but not the spirit. If only Tolkien could see the use his work has been put to, now.

Devotion to a true tradition demands hard work and a lifetime of dedication, but it’s worth it. Food for thought.

If you want to dive into some of Tolkien’s true tradition, the version of the Nibelungenlied I just reread is the verse translation of Burton Raffel. I also recently read the prose translation of William Whobrey, which was quite good and included excellent scholarly apparatus. And the two translations of the Elder or Poetic Edda, also mentioned by Shippey above, that I have most enjoyed are those by Carolyne Larrington and the aforementioned Jackson Crawford. These are good places to start in the tradition that informed Tolkien.

I posted a meditation on the perversion of virtue in the Nibelungenlied two weeks ago here. And as it happens, I wrote something about misleading “surface similarities” just yesterday.