Mythcon 1997

Wayne G. Hammond and

Christina Scull
J.R.R. Tolkien: The Achievement of His
Literary Life

I
t is a tall order to address the theme of this conference, which we
repeat in our title. Tolkien’s achievement really should be in the
plural. He achieved so much in his long life: scholar and storyteller,
artist, inspiring teacher, husband and father. Of all of his achievements,
it may be that the most important is that his works have brought
together so many thousands of readers, in the Mythopoeic Society
and similar organizations. We meet, in person or by correspondence,
in fellowship and in friendship, even in marriage. This is a great
achievement for an author, to have changed his readers’ lives, changed
them sometimes dramatically, and changed them for the better.
Nor are we alone in this feeling. In late 1996 Waterstones, a
bookseller in Britain perhaps best compared to Borders in the United
States, and British television’s Channel 4 Book Choice program asked
people to nominate up to five titles as their “Books of the Century.”
Twenty-five thousand people voted, and from their nominations a list
of the one hundred most popular books of the twentieth century was
produced. The first five titles were: number five, Catch-22 by Joseph
Heller; number four, Ulysses by James Joyce; number three, Animal
Farm by George Orwell; number two, Orwell again with Nineteen
Eighty-Four; and number one, The Lord of the Rings, with a third more
votes than the runner-up. As at least one critic noted, books of fantasy
won the top three spots. The Hobbit came nineteenth, and The Lion, the
Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis was twenty-first.
There was an outcry of horror from some members of the
literary elite. As reported by Alberge and Wagner in the Times of
London, the critic Auberon Waugh found the result suspicious, and
suggested that the author’s fans might have orchestrated a campaign.
Germaine Greer wrote that as a lifelong teacher of English she regarded
the list with dismay, that ever since she first met some Tolkien fans
in Cambridge in 1964 it had been her nightmare that Tolkien would
turn out to be the most influential writer of the twentieth century,
and now her bad dream had materialized. “D.S.” in the Times Literary
Supplement found the results “horrifying” and complained that there

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were only thirteen women writers in the top one hundred, but did
not suggest that men had deliberately conspired to fix the poll. David
Charter, also in the Times, reported on the view of Chris Woodhead,
the Chief Inspector of Schools in Britain, that the choice of The Lord of
the Rings as the nation’s favorite book was an example of low cultural
expectations. But Professor Richards of Lancaster University, in reply
to Mr. Woodhead, wrote to the Daily Telegraph in glowing terms,
praising The Lord of the Rings and remarking that the more people of
all ages who read it, the better for both the literary level of the country
and its spiritual health.
The poll was addressed to the general public and not to the
inner circle who consider that only they know what is worth reading.
Many people in fact are put off by the unimaginative, ruthlessly
realistic, and politically correct works that get good reviews but don’t
exactly make a good read. A Mr. Nick Beeson wrote to the Times to
say that he was delighted that The Lord of the Rings had been chosen
as the nation’s favorite, and that it was a splendid starting point
for Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Chaucer. Paul Goodman in the Daily
Telegraph noted some weaknesses in The Lord of the Rings but felt that
these were outweighed by its strengths. He said that one reason why
it appeals to so many is that it faces conclusions as true as they are
commonplace: that growing up is painful but cannot be avoided;
that it involves hard choices, which we are free to take; that choices
have consequences, and that even good ones will not bring back the
past. He concluded that Tolkien’s epic is not the greatest book of the
century, but one should be wary of the judgement of anyone who
hates it.
The Daily Telegraph repeated the poll among its readers, and
the same three books came tops!
But worse was to come for the literary establishment. 1996
was the fiftieth anniversary of the Folio Society, a British book club
which also operates in the United States. The Society publishes
editions of classics, ancient and modern, commissioning special
illustrations and bindings. To celebrate its golden jubilee it asked
its members to nominate the ten books that had most inspired,
influenced, or affected them, whether previously published by the
Society or not. Ten thousand members voted, and in April 1997 the
results were published. Yet again, The Lord of the Rings came first, this
time beating not only its twentieth-century rivals but also works by
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Austen, Dickens, Shakespeare, Tolstoy (in places two through five),

Kipling, Chaucer, the Brontës, Mark Twain, Dante, Homer, Melville,
Dostoyevsky, Defoe, Cervantes, Flaubert, and even the Bible!
From these polls we learn that Tolkien is popular with the
general public, but less so with university professors, literary critics,
and writers. Of course there is nothing wrong with being popular. It
is true that much popular writing is soon forgotten, but much also
survives. Charles Dickens and Mark Twain were popular in their day;
Shakespeare rather than Spenser is the best-known of Elizabethan
writers. There are many reasons why Tolkien is so popular: he is a
great storyteller, and readers appreciate his clear style, the breadth of
his imagination, the care with which he created his Secondary World.
They respond to the mythic resonances in his writings. And he does
open new vistas, as Mr. Nick Beeson suggests. His writings have
inspired a new interest in works such as Beowulf, the Icelandic Sagas,
and Middle English poems. Some people have even been inspired to
study Anglo-Saxon or Old Icelandic. Surely this is an achievement that
would have meant a great deal to Tolkien, who was both personally
and professionally concerned with these languages and literatures.
But in Britain Tolkien is not included in university literature
courses, and is not welcome as a subject for theses. He would not
have been offended by this. He did not see the need for recent authors
to be part of the university English syllabus, and he would certainly
have disliked having his creations constructed, deconstructed, and
torn apart according to the prejudices and subjective ideas of current
teaching. Of course, as Tom Shippey has pointed out, the Oxford
English establishment were mortified that it was someone on the
language, and not the literary, side who produced a bestseller, and
have never forgiven him.
Tolkien was asked, late in life, by which of his achievements
would he like to be remembered. He replied that he did not think he
had much choice: if he was remembered, it would be for The Lord of
the Rings. And so he is – and for The Hobbit, which long ago became
a classic among children’s books. Actually, Tolkien was not entirely
right; and if the Oxford English establishment have never forgiven
him his fame as a popular author, neither have they and many other
scholars forgotten his academic achievements. He is still remembered,
and honored, for his landmark essay on Beowulf, for his standard
edition with E.V. Gordon of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (still in
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print in the revision by Norman Davis), and, increasingly in children’s

literature studies, for his seminal essay “On Fairy-Stories.”
But these do tend to be overshadowed, as Tolkien predicted,
by his best known and most widely read work of fantasy fiction. The
Lord of the Rings also eclipses something more. Tolkien’s popularity,
given its high level and that it has been sustained for decades, is
indeed a notable achievement. But that is not what we mean by the
achievement of Tolkien’s literary life. Popularity is easily won, and
easily lost, and subject to fashion. The number of copies a book sells
is not by itself a good indicator of lasting value. When speaking of
Tolkien, we mean instead his larger, more difficult, and extremely
rare feat of creating a world in fiction that seems to be as wide and
deep and rich, as real, as our own—the paradigm of fantasy worlds in
this century, as Clute and Grant’s Encyclopedia of Fantasy calls it.
This is a truly great achievement in literature. How great
is it? Greater than we knew, or could know, when we first read
Tolkien years ago—we are now looking back three or four decades.
At that time there were The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and the
shorter works: Farmer Giles of Ham, Smith of Wootton Major, the “Tom
Bombadil” poems. The Silmarillion was then only a promise. Tolkien’s
death in 1973, with his last work unfinished, seemed to bring his
canon to a close. But Christopher Tolkien took up his father’s mantle,
and completed The Silmarillion for publication. And then that work
appeared to be all that there would be, apart from the odd volume,
such as The Father Christmas Letters and the translations of Sir Gawain,
Pearl, and Sir Orfeo, and “Bilbo’s Last Song” as an attractive poster.
The word last in this title was ominous.
Three years after The Silmarillion, which had been announced
with fanfare, Unfinished Tales arrived almost unheralded. Christopher
Tolkien had hinted in his foreword to The Silmarillion of a great body
of manuscripts that lay behind that work, or that were associated with
it, but we could not have hoped for so much that now began to be
published. Even Tolkien’s unfinished writings were more precious
than the “finished” clones of his imitators. Nor could we have
hoped, or even suspected, that after only another three years would
begin The History of Middle-earth, a work whose length and scope
even Christopher Tolkien could not foresee, and which took twelve
volumes and fourteen years to complete.
This conference celebrates the achievement of J.R.R. Tolkien,
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in the sixtieth anniversary year of The Hobbit, first published in 1937.

It also marks the completion last year of The History of Middle-earth,
and acknowledges the great debt we owe to Christopher Tolkien
for bringing some of his father’s remaining works to our eyes, or for
making this possible through the work of other scholars. As more of
Tolkien’s writings have been published, the scope of his achievement
has continued to grow. And as the scope of his work grows, so does
the potential scope of Tolkien studies; and with more study, we learn
to appreciate Tolkien’s works even better.
We used to think, from time to time, that there was nothing
more to be said about Tolkien – it had all been said already. In fact
this was never true, even in those pre-Silmarillion days: The Lord of
the Rings, and The Hobbit too, are works too rich with meaning ever
to be exhausted. Each reading, even now, illuminates new truths.
Today, with Unfinished Tales, The History of Middle-earth, and other
resources at hand—especially the published letters, which many still
neglect—let no one say that the best of Tolkien studies are in the past!
Indeed they are alive and well; and some of the credit for this goes to
the Mythopoeic Society and its journal and bulletin, which provide
outlets for Tolkien scholarship.
Tolkien studies in fact have hardly begun. This became clear
to us while writing our book J.R.R. Tolkien: Artist and Illustrator. We
had known some of Tolkien’s art for The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings,
and The Silmarillion as it had been published in calendars, and in the
collection of Pictures, and his art also for The Father Christmas Letters
and Mr. Bliss. But we had no idea, when Christopher Tolkien in
1992 asked us to write about this subject, that hundreds of Tolkien’s
paintings and drawings had been preserved. Nor did we suspect that
his art had such a close relationship with his writings. Christopher
had written in The Book of Lost Tales, Part One (p. 7) that “for the
begetter of Middle-earth and Valinor there was a deep coherence and
vital interrelation between all its times, places, and beings, whatever
the literary modes.” That the same should be true between Tolkien’s
art and text was a revelation, and is a subject we have by no means
fully explored in our book.
When we then turned to Tolkien’s unpublished children’s
story Roverandom, we should have assumed that it would not be quite
as simple as it appeared, or as it had been represented to us. You will
have read Humphrey Carpenter’s summary of the tale in his Biography
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(161-62):
When he was on holiday with the family at Filey in the
summer of 1925, Tolkien composed a full-length tale for
John and Michael. The younger boy lost a toy dog on the
beach, and to console him his father began to invent and
narrate the adventures of Rover, a small dog who annoys
a wizard, is turned into a toy, and is then lost on the beach
by a small boy. But this is only the beginning, for Rover is
found by the sand-sorcerer Psamathos Psamathides who
gives him the power to move again, and sends him on a visit
to the Moon, where he has many strange adventures, most
notably an encounter with the White Dragon.
You also may have seen the five illustrations Tolkien made for
Roverandom which we published in Artist and Illustrator. We ourselves
saw the art first, and when writing Artist and Illustrator read the story
quickly in its latest typescript, to put the pictures in context.
HarperCollins commissioned us at the end of summer 1997
to edit Roverandom and to write a brief introduction. Could we have
it done by the end of December? they asked. Apart from delays in
obtaining a microfilm copy from the Bodleian Library in Oxford, so
that we could work with it at home in Massachusetts, we had to read,
decipher, and analyze one manuscript and three typescript versions;
and in doing so we discovered that Roverandom was not at all a simple
children’s story. Although it was, in the first instance, invented for
Tolkien’s eldest sons, typically for this author it had multiple levels—
not to mention layers of revision. We found it unexpectedly rich in
sources, from the Icelandic Sagas to Gilbert and Sullivan; that it has
lateral connections with the “Father Christmas” letters; that it looks
forward in several ways to The Hobbit, which Tolkien began not too
much later; and that it even briefly touches the “Silmarillion.”
This is how the story begins (Roverandom 3–5):
Once upon a time there was a little dog, and his name was Rover. He
was very small, and very young, or he would have known better;
and he was very happy playing in the garden in the sunshine with
a yellow ball, or he would never have done what he did.

Not every old man with ragged trousers is a bad old

man: some are bone-and-bottle men, and have little dogs of their
own; and some are gardeners; and a few, a very few, are wizards
prowling round on a holiday looking for something to do. This
one was a wizard, the one that now walked into the story. He came
wandering up the garden-path in a ragged old coat, with an old

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pipe in his mouth, and an old green hat on his head. If Rover had
not been so busy barking at the ball, he might have noticed the blue
feather stuck in the back of the green hat, and then he would have
suspected that the man was a wizard, as any other sensible little
dog would; but he never saw the feather at all.

When the old man stooped down and picked up the ball
– he was thinking of turning it into an orange, or even a bone or a
piece of meat for Rover – Rover growled, and said:

‘Put it down!’ Without ever a ‘please’.

Of course the wizard, being a wizard, understood

perfectly, and he answered back again:

‘Be quiet, silly!’ Without ever a ‘please’.

Then he put the ball in his pocket, just to tease the dog,
and turned away. I am sorry to say that Rover immediately bit his
trousers, and tore out quite a piece. Perhaps he also tore out a piece
of the wizard. Anyway the old man suddenly turned round very
angry and shouted:

‘Idiot! Go and be a toy!’

After that the most peculiar things began to happen.

Rover was only a little dog to begin with, but he suddenly felt very
much smaller. The grass seemed to grow monstrously tall and
wave far above his head; and a long way away through the grass,
like the sun rising through the trees of a forest, he could see the
huge yellow ball, where the wizard had thrown it down again. He
heard the gate click as the old man went out, but he could not see
him. He tried to bark, but only a little tiny noise came out, too small
for ordinary people to hear; and I don’t suppose even a dog would
have noticed it.
You may have noticed that the wizard, whose name is
Artaxerxes, bears a slight resemblance to Gandalf—wandering up the
path into the story, and prone to quick anger. Two other magicians in
Roverandom, Psamathos the sand-sorcerer (in fact a borrowing from E.
Nesbit) and the Man-in-the-Moon, are also precursors of Gandalf, in
different ways. The Great White Dragon, whom Carpenter mentions,
is rather like Smaug in The Hobbit; in fact Tolkien drew the two
dragons exactly the same. The Man-in-the-Moon of course features in
some of Tolkien’s poems, and is in an unpublished part of one of the
“Father Christmas” letters.
Later in the story Artaxerxes has become the Pacific and

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Atlantic Magician, or PAM—which is a play on the nickname of Lord

Palmerston, a renowned British Prime Minister in the nineteenth
century. As the resident wizard to the Mer-king, Artaxerxes has the
job of dealing with the great and ancient Sea-serpent, who is waking
up and causing trouble (76):
When he undid a curl or two in his sleep, the water
heaved and shook and bent people’s houses and spoilt their
repose for miles and miles around. But it was very stupid to
send the PAM to look into it; for of course the Sea-serpent
is much too enormous and strong and old and idiotic for
any one to control (primordial, prehistoric, autothalassic,
fabulous, mythical, and silly are other adjectives applied to
him); and Artaxerxes knew it all only too well.
Not even the Man-in-the-Moon working hard for
fifty years could have concocted a spell large enough or long
enough or strong enough to bind him. Only once had the
Man-in-the-Moon tried (when specially requested), and at
least one continent fell into the sea as a result.
Poor old Artaxerxes drove straight up to the mouth
of the Sea-serpent’s cave. But he had no sooner got out of his
carriage than he saw the tip of the Sea-serpent’s tail sticking
out of the entrance; larger it was than a row of gigantic
water-barrels, and green and slimy. That was quite enough
for him. He wanted to go home at once before the Worm
turned again – as all worms will at odd and unexpected
moments.
Even in this very brief excerpt from Roverandom there are
several points of interest—and from these you can gather how much
work we had to do in glossing this “simple children’s story.” The style
of writing is similar to that Tolkien would use not very long afterwards
in The Hobbit. Although this is a children’s story, Tolkien isn’t afraid to
use big words: primordial, prehistoric, autothalassic (that means “sprung
from the sea”, and as far as we can tell is not in the Oxford English
Dictionary). Artaxerxes’ spotting of the Sea-serpent’s tail sticking out
of the cave entrance sounds very like Garm coming suddenly upon
the dragon’s tail in Farmer Giles of Ham, which also dates from this
period. The continent that fell into the sea is presumably Atlantis, as
Númenor had not yet entered Tolkien’s mythology. As for the Worm
turning, there are many playful turns of phrase and twisted proverbs
like this in Roverandom. Tolkien had fun writing it!
The Sea-serpent is connected of course with the Midgard

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serpent of Norse mythology, and possibly also with Leviathan in

the Book of Job, but also has a personal connection with the author.
On the fifth of September 1925, while Tolkien and his family were
on holiday at Filey, the north-east coast of England was struck by a
terrific storm. The Tolkiens were kept awake into the night (this story
is also told in The Tolkien Family Album). To calm his two older sons,
Tolkien told them the story of Roverandom, and no doubt it was the
storm that inspired the incident in the story of the Sea-serpent waking
and wreaking havoc as “the water heaved and shook.”
The most striking of all the parts of Roverandom that connect
with or prefigure or echo Tolkien’s other writings comes late in the
story. The dog Rover has become known as “Roverandom”—because
he does not know where he is going next—and he is now also a mer-
dog, transformed by magic, and lives in the Mer-king’s palace under
the sea. He has a friend, another mer-dog, and is acquainted with a
great whale, Uin – not quite the same as the whale of that name in The
Book of Lost Tales, but close enough (73–4):
Another day old Uin turned up again and gave the
two dogs a ride for a change; it was like riding on a moving
mountain. They were away for days and days; and they only
turned back from the eastern edge of the world just in time.
There the whale rose to the top and blew out a fountain of
water so high that a lot of it was thrown right off the world
and over the edge.
Another time he took them to the other side (or
as near as he dared), and that was a still longer and more
exciting journey, the most marvellous of all Roverandom’s
travels, as he realised later, when he was grown to be an older
and a wiser dog. It would take the whole of another story, at
least, to tell you of all their adventures in Uncharted Waters
and of their glimpses of lands unknown to geography,
before they passed the Shadowy Seas and reached the great
Bay of Fairyland (as we call it) beyond the Magic Isles; and
saw far off in the last West the Mountains of Elvenhome and
the light of Faery upon the waves. Roverandom thought he
caught a glimpse of the city of the Elves on the green hill
beneath the Mountains, a glint of white far away; but Uin
dived again so suddenly that he could not be sure. If he was
right, he is one of the very few creatures, on two legs or
four, who can walk about our own lands and say they have
glimpsed that other land, however far away.
‘I should catch it, if this was found out!’ said Uin. ‘No one

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from the Outer Lands is supposed ever to come here; and few ever
do now. Mum’s the word!’
Roverandom is set in our own world, more or less contemporary
with the date of the story, with a few surprising changes. But here, as
he was to do later in The Hobbit, Tolkien drew upon the legendarium
that occupied his thoughts and made it part of the foundation of his
story.
Our work on Roverandom showed us once again that Tolkien’s
achievement was greater than we had imagined. It also revealed the
unappreciated importance of what we might call Tolkien’s “middle
period,” between his earliest work on the “Silmarillion” legends and
the writing of The Lord of the Rings. He did not cease to work on his
mythology; but the birth of his children sent him at the same time
onto a parallel track. This was a period of storytelling, in which Tom
Bombadil and Farmer Giles were invented, the “Father Christmas”
letters were begun and developed, and Roverandom was written and
revised. It began with stories told to young John Tolkien (born 1917),
and culminated with The Hobbit.
Humphrey Carpenter wrote in his Biography (172):
So it was that during the nineteen-twenties and thirties
Tolkien’s imagination was running along two distinct
courses that did not meet. On one side were the stories
composed for mere amusement, often specifically for
the entertainment of his children. On the other were the
grander themes, sometimes Arthurian or Celtic, but usually
associated with his own legends. Meanwhile nothing
was reaching print, beyond a few poems in the Oxford
Magazine. . . . Something was lacking, something that would
bind the two sides of his imagination together and produce
a story that was at once heroic and mythical and at the same
time tuned to the popular imagination. He was not aware of
this lack, of course; nor did it seem particularly significant to
him when suddenly the missing piece fell into place.
What was missing, Carpenter suggests, was The Hobbit. We would
suggest, now that we have the evidence of Roverandom before us, that
The Hobbit was the most ambitious of Tolkien’s children’s stories, and
the last that he wrote. But the true merging of Tolkien’s two sides—
the storyteller and the mythologist—didn’t occur until The Lord of the
Rings. Roverandom shows that elements and influences from Tolkien’s
invented “Silmarillion” world were straying into the stories he told his
children, even before he wrote The Hobbit; while The Hobbit confirms,
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with its several stronger borrowings from the mythology, that this
was the direction Tolkien’s writings wanted to go.
He tried to resist the pull when he began The Lord of the Rings
still in the Hobbit children’s-story mode, but the movement fully into
the world of the “Silmarillion” was inexorable, and probably inevitable.
Roverandom now fills in more of the picture of the development of
Tolkien’s writing during the twenties and thirties, and it is not too
much to say that The Lord of the Rings might not have come into being
were it not for stories like this, for their popularity with the Tolkien
children, and with the author himself, led to The Hobbit, and so to its
sequel.
It is an amazing and amusing fact that more books bearing
Tolkien’s name as the author have been published since his death than
while he was alive. Some reviewers have seized on this in remarks
such as that Tolkien’s publishers have been scraping the bottom of
the barrel in bringing The History of Middle-earth and other works into
print—or else they have simply ignored more recent volumes by or
about Tolkien, as if they were more of the same, and of no consequence.
But at the bottom of the Tolkien barrel are not dregs, but more gems;
and the bottom in fact has not been scraped: we have not yet reached
it. There remain interesting fragments of stories still unpublished, and
great masses of material dealing with the languages of Middle-earth,
and also academic papers and notes by Tolkien. We all have much to
look forward to; and those of us who edit Tolkien or write about him
have a lot of work ahead.

This article was published originally in something else, somewhere else in

this year. It is reprinted here with permission from someone. Leslie will
insert these.

Works Cited
Alberge, Dalya, and Erica Wagner. “Tolkien Wins Title Lord of the Books
by Popular Acclaim.” Times [London] 20 Jan. 1997: 4.
Beeson, Nick. Letter. Times [London] 25 Jan. 1997: 27.
Carpenter, Humphrey. J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography. George Allen & Unwin,
1977.
Charter, David. “Del Boy Is Not Reliant Role Model, Says Schools Chief.”
Times [London] 22 Jan. 1997: 1.

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 Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull – Mythcon 1997

Clute, John, and John Grant, eds. The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. St. Martin’s,
1997. 951.
Goodman, Paul. “Is This Really the Century’s Greatest Book.” Daily
Telegraph 21 Jan. 1997: 16.
Greer, Germaine. “The Book of the Century?” W Magazine (Jan. 1997):
2–8.
Richards, Jeffrey. Letter. Daily Telegraph 1 Feb. 1997: 11.
S., D. “Nota Bene.” Times Literary Supplement 24 Jan. 1997: 16.
Shippey, Tom. Interview. J.R.R.T.: A Portrait of John Ronald Reuel Tolkien.
Landseer Film & Television Productions, 1992.
Tolkien, Christopher, ed. “Foreword.” The Book of Lost Tales, Part One. By
J.R.R. Tolkien. George Allen & Unwin, 1983. 1–11.
Tolkien, J.R.R. Interview. BBC Radio. 1964. BBC Cassettes, 1980.
—Roverandom. Ed. Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond.
HarperCollins, 1998.

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