Preface to “The Mirror of Desire Unbidden”

The present work is animated by a conviction: to understand Tolkien’s literature it is necessary to tell the history of Western imagination and fantasy. Once we trace it to its beginning in Homer and the Old Testament and follow it through to the end of the Middle Ages, we see how there are three omissions in Tolkien’s narrative and biographical/literary self-portrait. The first omission is precisely the role that Tolkien means to play in the tradition of Western fantasy. The second is the omission of the importance of late Middle English literature in particular as a source for his fiction. The third omission is the removal of the co-related elements of woman, body, and sexuality from Tolkien’s narrative. To these three omissions there could be added a fourth that coincides with the absence of religion.

The aim of the present work is then to look into these three omissions and the reasons thereof in order to point out their interrelation in a purposeful design to achieve a peculiar literary effect as well as to thematize a theological gender dimension that, while still aligned to the main currents in the Christian theology of Tolkien’s time, is highly original, anticipates future developments and even surpasses them. The role played by late Middle English literature in prompting such ideas is evidenced in detail with particular reference to Chaucer, Langland, the author of Sir Orfeo, and especially the Gawain-Poet.

As Elizabeth Zuckert reports: “according to both Strauss and Derrida, what an author does not say can be more important than what is said” (Zuckert 1996: 202), or, to phrase it differently, in their philosophy “the ‘subtext’ is more meaningful than the text” (Beiner 2004: 150). Clearly from such an assumption it is not evident that it should be applied to Tolkien as well, nor how, and on the contrary it could be argued that Tolkien repeatedly warns against applying to his texts categories that are foreign to their letter, as though it was an allegory. It is not necessary to quote all instances of such warnings, but one is especially revealing, distinguishing Allegory from Story:

Of course, Allegory and Story converge, meeting somewhere in Truth. So that the only perfectly consistent allegory is a real life; and the only fully intelligible story is an allegory. And one finds, even in imperfect human ‘literature’, that the better and more consistent an allegory is the more easily can it be read ‘just as a story’; and the better and more closely woven a story is the more easily can those so minded find allegory in it. But the two start out from opposite ends (Letters 121)

It does not especially matter whether the allegorised of the allegory is religion, sex, adultery, or the image of God. The point is that, however Tolkien may say that he came up with full-fledged stories out of the blue, this is simply unbelievable, as everybody as well as he himself agrees that he was inspired by Germanic and, to a lesser extent, Celtic mythology. Subtext is then acknowledged by him, at least as the analogy of the soup of story in his essay On Fairy-stories (OFS 39-40). It only takes to consider the range of his knowledge of the Classics and the Bible to understand the first omission, and it is his expertise in Middle English that is key to the second, while the third results from both the arguments advanced for the previous two. Besides, as he says, there is allegory in any story, and allegory is a mode of Truth, which means that, even if Tolkien’s authorial intent was not allegorical, the texts he wrote can signify meanings not intended by the author and yet belonging to him, not only to the reader. Indeed, it is precisely Tolkien’s warning against allegory that begs the question of what is concealed behind the text and is yet revealed through the text itself, by way of ellipsis, and truly the motivating challenge for the scholar of Tolkien’s literature is understanding the reasons for, and modalities of, such a concealment.

What follows is an attempt to undertake such a challenge.

(Giovanni Carmine Costabile, “Preface” in “The Mirror of Desire Unbidden: Retrieving the Imago Dei in Tolkien and Late Medieval English Literature,” Peter Lang, 20 May 2024)

John William Waterhouse, Mariana Looking in the Mirror

Tolkien and Historical Criticism: An Issue of Method

First folio of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, British Library MS Cotton Nero A.x.

Tolkien and Historical Criticism: An Issue of Method

Historical criticism was historically conceived first of all as a method of Biblical Studies, also being called “higher criticism,” and being first traced to the philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677). During the Enlightenment, Biblical criticism commonly applied the term “higher criticism” to mainstream scholarship in contrast to “lower criticism” (textual criticism). Historical criticism required the detachment of the scholar from devotion to the object of their study and, as such, at first it was opposed by the Catholic Church.

In the middle of the 20^th century, however, such attitudes changed. The Instruction on the Historical Truth of the Gospels (21 April 1964) by the Pontifical Biblical Commission textually confirmed the legitimacy of the historical-critical method, describing its exegetical traits as source analysis, textual criticism, literary criticism, linguistic studies, and the method of form history. The 19^th century approach to higher criticism in Classical Studies similarly renounced attempts to provide ancient religion with modern sense and applicability to focus instead on the collection and chronological ordering of the sources. This way, historical criticism came to be applied to any text: Biblical, Classical, Byzantine, Medieval, Eastern, or other.

Tolkien was well aware of the history of historical criticism, since he referred to textual criticism of the Bible in his Valedictory Address to Oxford University: “I have once or twice, not so long ago, been asked to explain or defend this language [Middle English]: to say (I suppose) how it can possibly be profitable or enjoyable. [. . .] To compare the less with the greater, is not that rather like asking an astronomer what he finds in mathematics? Or a theologian what is the interest of the textual criticism of Scripture?” (MC 237, emphasis original).

It is important to clarify that Tolkien never objected anything to the methodology of historical criticism. His remarks on Beowulf in his 1936 lecture Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics are not aimed at historical criticism. There, Tolkien rather objects to a literary work that he considers a masterwork being studied exclusively as an historical document and not as a literary text:

The historian’s search is, of course, perfectly legitimate, even if it does not assist criticism in general at all (for that is not its object), so long as it is not mistaken for criticism. To Professor Birger Nerman as an historian of Swedish origins Beowulf is doubtless an important document, but he is not writing a history of English poetry. Of the second case it may be said that to rate a poem, a thing at the least in metrical form, as mainly of historical interest should in a literary survey be equivalent to saying that it has no literary merits, and little more need in such a survey then be said about it. But such a judgement on Beowulf is false. (MC 7)

In other words, Tolkien is here distinguishing pure history from historical criticism. There is no doubt that by criticism he means historical criticism, because he admits that the historian’s search is helpful to criticism. Besides, Tolkien’s own study of Beowulf was historical. He was interested, among other things, in the dating of the poem, the reconstruction of the identity of the author, textual criticism, and the relations of the poem with other Old English and Germanic works. In his studies on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, similarly, Tolkien was concerned with the dating of the poem, the identity of the author, textual criticism, and sources and analogues. And the same applies to his studies on Chaucer, with due distinctions. Despite his own protests at being defined a critic (Letters 126, no. 113), then, Tolkien undoubtedly was a historical critic.

While this observation does not directly implicate that historical criticism is the best way to study Tolkien, it is certainly noteworthy. In 2023, contrarily to the idea, Tom Emmanuel suggested that critics bypass Tolkien the author in the study of his works, referring to Michel Foucault’s problematic notion of the author-function:

In everyday speech we are used to talking about an author quite transparently as the historically specific writer of a given text. [. . .] Foucault problematizes this simple equation with his formulation of the author-function. The name of an author is not simply a proper noun with a single, identifiable referent; it is a frame for the texts which are ascribed to it, a heuristic “to group together a certain number of texts, define them, differentiate them from and contrast them to others.”. (Emmanuel 2023: 34)

The unintended irony implicit in the suggestion to bypass Tolkien the author is that it recommends forsaking the methodology of historical criticism for the sake of avoiding to idolize the author when historical criticism is a methodology that was born after the effort to de-idolize the Bible. Emmanuel is then saying that what it takes to desecrate the Bible not only is not sufficient to desecrate Tolkien, but it actually consecrates him. According to Emmanuel, it follows, Tolkien is not as sacred as the Bible, but more. The problem is not addressed at all in Emmanuel’s article, and yet it undermines its very premises of opposing the sacralization of Tolkien. As a consequence, I think that Emmanuel’s criticism of the application of historical criticism to Tolkien is untenable and historical criticism remains the preferable methodology to be applied to Tolkien’s works.

Abbreviations

Letters = The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien

MC = The Monsters and the Critics

Works Cited

Emmanuel, Tom. 2023. “”It Is ‘About’ Nothing But Itself”: Tolkienian Theology Beyond the Domination of the Author.” Mythlore, Vol. 42, No. 1, Article 3, pp. 29-53. https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol42/iss1/3/. Accessed 22 April 2024.

Tolkien, John Ronald Reuel. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Edited by Humphrey Carpenter. Harper Collins, 1995.

Tolkien, John Ronald Reuel. The Monsters and the Critics. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. Harper Collins, 2013.