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Tolkien's Anatomy of Tradition in the Silmarillion UNIVERSITY OF SZEGED INSTITUTE OF ENGLISH AND AMERICAN STUDIES Nagy Gergely ‘YE OLDE AUTHOUR’: TOLKIEN’S ANATOMY OF TRADITION IN THE SILMARILLION PhD Dissertation Supervisor: Dr. Szőnyi György Endre Szeged, 2012 2 Acknowledgements When I started working on this research, there was virtually no secondary literature available on Tolkien in Hungary. Over the years, many people I came to know (virtually or personally) helped me remedy this and further my work, by sending me copies of books, articles, manuscripts that have not yet appeared. Thanks are due for this reason to Theodore J. Sherman, Jane Chance, Tom Shippey, Verlyn Flieger, Douglas A. Anderson, Allan Turner, Marjorie Burns, Michael D.C. Drout, and Richard C. West. Many of these people I met at the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, MI, where I was able to travel with the combined help of the Faculty of Humanities, University of Szeged, and my own Institute of English and American Studies, for which I am very grateful. In 2003, I was able to spend three months at Wheaton College, Norton, MA, with the generous help of the Hungarian Eötvös Scholarship, which is here gratefully acknowledged. Over and above the people already mentioned, I owe thanks to Tóth Benedek, Donald Morse, Kopár Lilla, and Makai Péter for their help with sources and thoughtful discussion. I also want to thank people from the Hungarian Tolkien Society with whom we discussed critical questions on internet forums (both at www.tolkien.hu and Völgyzugoly) and at three conferences we organized in the first half of the 2000s. 3 Table of Contents Table of Contents ....................................................................................................................... 3 1. Introduction ............................................................................................................................ 4 2. Tolkien and textuality: medieval and beyond ...................................................................... 30 2.1 Metatextuality: Tolkien’s duplication of texts ............................................................... 31 2.2 The problem of the Silmarils: The Silmarillion and its problematics ............................ 41 2.2.1 Primary Silmarillion ................................................................................................ 44 2.2.3 Secondary Silmarillion ............................................................................................ 53 2.2.3 Critical Silmarillion ................................................................................................. 59 3. Aspects of The Silmarillion: the manuscript analogue ......................................................... 65 3.1 Bilbo as author ............................................................................................................... 68 3.2 The layering of the Silmarillion text .............................................................................. 74 3.2.1 Texts and styles ....................................................................................................... 75 3.2.1.1 Authors: prose .................................................................................................. 77 3.2.1.2 Authors: poems ................................................................................................ 80 3.2.1.3 Transmission: interpolation vs. compilation .................................................... 83 3.2.1.4 Transmission: internal vs. external ................................................................... 85 3.2.2 Texts and structure .................................................................................................. 93 3.2.2.1 SElf-reference ................................................................................................... 95 3.2.2.2 Cross-reference ............................................................................................... 100 3.2.2.3 Internal structure ............................................................................................ 104 3.2.2.4 Narrative as structure...................................................................................... 109 3.2.3 Texts and subjects ................................................................................................. 114 3.2.4 Texts and sources .................................................................................................. 129 3.2.4.1 Source as text or composition ........................................................................ 130 3.2.4.2 Source as convention ...................................................................................... 139 3.2.4.3 Source and authority ....................................................................................... 146 4. Aspects of culture: the cultural context and its use in The Silmarillion ............................. 151 4.1 Cultural contexts .......................................................................................................... 153 4.1.1 Languages, horizons, shifts ................................................................................... 154 4.1.2 Points of view ........................................................................................................ 165 4.2 Authority and its hierarchies ........................................................................................ 170 4.2.1 Diadoche and its stages ......................................................................................... 171 4.2.2 Knowledge and its technologies ............................................................................ 176 4.3 Authors and their acts ................................................................................................... 182 5. Metarepresentation: theories of culture and fiction in The Silmarillion ............................ 191 5.1 The great chain of knowledge and authority ................................................................ 192 5.1.1 Meaning and interpreting: a reading of the ‘Ainulindalë’ ..................................... 193 5.1.2 Pervasive meaning ................................................................................................. 197 5.1.3 Knowledge/Power ................................................................................................. 203 5.2 A plural space ............................................................................................................... 208 5.2.1 Textual plurality: acts of interpretation ................................................................. 209 5.2.2 Cultural plurality: discourses and ideologies ........................................................ 212 5.2.3 Subjects of culture: defining and defined .............................................................. 216 5.2.4 Myth and representation ........................................................................................ 222 6. Conclusions: Tolkien and the fiction of culture ................................................................. 232 7. Abbreviations ..................................................................................................................... 238 8. Bibliography ....................................................................................................................... 239 4 1. Introduction The Lord of the Rings was published nearly sixty years ago, but this is not the only thing why J.R.R. Tolkien and his work are often seen irreducibly ‘old’. The very image of Tolkien most often appearing in the popular mind is that of a white-haired, pipe-smoking Oxford don with a pronunciation nearly as hard to decode as Ozzy Osbourne’s. As a comparative philologist, a linguist and a medieval scholar, his areas of interest were old languages (especially Germanic) and literature; the sources and parallels that critics point out in his works are nearly always old (and to most readers, unknown) texts. The worldview his works sketch out is also more traditional (old) than new, contemporary, or modern. His emphatically devout Roman Catholic Christianity counts as an outdated (old) ‘great narrative’ under the postmodern condition. Yet Tolkien’s works maintain a solid readership even to the point of The Lord of the Rings being named the most important book of the twentieth century,1 and are celebrated as essentially connected with (even ‘grounding’) the present of popular literature.2 His considered, ideological anti-modernity, however, still functions as a reminder that perhaps even he himsElf wanted to be seen as old. But this emphasis on tradition, on the old world of languages and myths masks a deeper and more ambiguous concern: Tolkien is less interested in the world than in the text. The text as he thought of it is also something old today, when even printed books slowly give way to hypertextual representation, and even medievalist research makes use of CD-ROMs and online resources. As a philologist Tolkien was dealing only with texts: editing, translating, teaching them, studying their words in a historical, comparative framework, poring over the 1 See Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (Boston–New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), xx- xxiv. 2 Brian Attebery starts the argument of his book Strategies of Fantasy (Bloomington–Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1992) by saying that “Tolkien’s form of fantasy, for readers in English, is our mental template [for the whole genre]” (14). 5 unknown meaning of some of them.3 As an author, he
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