Reflections Read Online Free PDF Page A

Chaucer made in his “Pardoner’s Tale.”
    As you see, Tolkien did not give away half of what he knew, even about plots, and I suspect he never talked about narrative at all, but it is clear from The Lord of the Rings that he knew all about narrative as well. The plot of The Lord of the Rings is, on the face of it, exactly the same simple one that he appeared to describe in his lectures: a journey that acquires an aim and develops into a kind of quest. But the bare plot is to any writer no more than the main theme of a sort of symphony which requires other themes added to it and the whole orchestrated into a narrative. To shape a narrative, you have to phase the various incidents and so control their nature that you set up significances, correspondences, foretastes, and expectations, until your finished story becomes something else again from its simple outline. Tolkien does this orchestrating supremely well: so much so that, by various narrative sleights-of-hand, he almost reverses the normal flow of a quest story, or at least makes an adaptation of it every bit as peculiar as the one he described in his lectures, and nobody ever notices. It continues to fool me even now, though I think I can see what he is up to.
    The Lord of the Rings is organized in movements, just like a symphony, but with this difference: each movement has an extension, or coda, which reflects partly back on the movement just completed, and partly forward to what is to come. This coda is highly characteristic of Tolkien’s method, and it becomes increasingly important as the narrative proceeds. You always have to watch what happens in these codas. And yet they, and the movements which precede them, in no way interfere with the story, the actual events being described, which appears to march steadily forward and to unfold with the utmost clarity and regularity. This limpid tale of events is one of Tolkien’s major achievements, when you consider all the other things he was doing too. However, one thing he was not doing was striving to put it all in elegant language. His manner is at all times prolix and a little threadbare. The most he will do is to attempt a rough appropriateness. When he is dealing with Hobbits, he is chatty and a little arch: “If Frodo had really wanted to write a book and had had many ears, he would have learned enough for several chapters in a few minutes” (I, 167). 2 In more awesome places, he uses a hackneyed high style: “Then his wrath blazed in a consuming flame, but his fear rose like a vast black smoke to choke him” (III, 223). It is symptomatic, I think, that he at all times overworks the word “suddenly.” To take the most random sample: “Suddenly he knew in his heart . . .” (I, 225); “Suddenly the lights went out” (II, 197); “Suddenly the silence was broken” (III, 127). As I know well enough myself, “suddenly” is a word hard to avoid in this kind of narrative. For Tolkien, as D. S. Brewer points out, 3 was writing a Romance in the old sense of the word. A Romance, unlike a novel, does not aim to draw attention to the way it is written. Tolkien was far more concerned with the matter of his narrative than its manner, and he only exercised his undoubted gift for language in inventing names, particularly names of places—which is again exactly in the tradition of a Romance. I always wish that Tolkien’s many imitators would notice how comparatively modest his language is, and not insist on writing their stuff in translationese.
    The first movement of the narrative lasts until the flight from Bree. Here, along with the chatty manner, we are in a cozy Hobbit world not very far removed from that of fairy tales and nursery rhymes. Hobbits have that prosaic fubsiness one associates with a certain kind of children’s story. And they are agreeably greedy and, above all, secure. But there is more to it than that. Throughout this section,