I am a self-proclaimed Inklings appreciator. From C.S. Lewis’s critical essays to Charles Williams’s doctrinal horror novels to Owen Barfield’s strange and marvelous metaphysic of symbols, this little group of writers has my heart. But even I worry sometimes if conservative and religiously inclined literary types spend too much time talking about this little literary group. A fixation on these 20th-century figures can tempt us into being reactionary in our own art and ignoring the imaginative Christian creators of today.
Guiseppe Pezzini’s new book, Tolkien and the Mystery of Literary Creation, points a way to balance our love of these figures of the past with an interest in the fortunes of literature today. Pezzini has not written just another work of Tolkien appreciation. Instead, he has taken the difficult step of exploring how Tolkien made what he made. Specifically, Pezzin identifies the principles at play in Tolkien’s imagination—principles that Tolkien himself was more or less aware of but that have received less critical attention than they deserve. In so doing, Pezzini gives us some helpful guidelines for how we can evaluate contemporary imaginative literature, as well as tools that fiction writers can use in their own creative process.
The book is part of a small but distinct trend of approaching Tolkien’s work as literature with a robust literary theory at play, not merely as world-building or even as storytelling. That distinction might be odd, but it is worth making. For a long time, fascination with Tolkien’s work has led to imitation in form and content, but it hasn’t led to much literary imitation or critical study. In fact, as Pezzini points out in his introduction, many people pooh-pooh Tolkien as a literary artist and imply that his stories succeed despite the language in which he tells them. Pezzini sets out to correct this view and to give Tolkien the close literary reading his work deserves.
What I mean here is that Pezzini sets out to study the actual words of Tolkien’s masterpieces, not simply the stories, events, themes, and allusions. In addition, he attempts to discern within Tolkien’s work an overarching literary theory, one based in the creative power of the Word (what Tolkien called “philological priority”).
Writing as Discovery
Literary criticism is an acquired taste, to be sure, and works of literary theory tend toward the incomprehensible, but Pezzini takes a straightforward and confident approach. He, like his subject, has an evident love of his material, and his unobtrusive style allows Tolkien’s work to take center stage.
The key argument of the book is that Tolkien developed a vibrant literary theory throughout his life, one that informed and empowered his somewhat chaotic creative process. Pezzini shows, through letters and interviews, that Tolkien himself experienced writing as a discovery; for example, Tolkien wrote in a letter to W.H. Auden that until the palantir“was cast out of the window [of Orthanc],” he knew nothing of the these “seeing-stones.” The Orthanc-stone burst upon him with the same surprise that strikes the reader, but it also made sense of “the ‘rhyme of lore’ that had been running in [his] mind: seven stars and seven stones and one white tree. These rhymes and names will crop up; but they do not always explain themselves,” Tolkien’s letter reads. In other words, even in the process of creating his own stories, Tolkien experienced that wonderful literary combination of surprise and inevitability.
This quasi-miraculous experience of co-creativity, in which the artist creates through discovery, does not happen by accident. It seems impossible for a world as complete, as layered and diverse and yet orderly, hierarchical, and imaginatively striking as Middle-Earth to have simply been discovered through the writing process. Yet it seems that is what happened. When a young writer reads accounts of the creation of Middle-Earth, he might be tempted simply to launch into his own epic and assume that by meandering around in his made-up world, slapping strange-sounding names onto invented objects and events, he’ll write a masterpiece. Masterpieces, alas, are much more demanding than this.
This sort of spontaneous coherence, this dazzling structure, was only possible because Tolkien was not writing from a haphazard imaginative and metaphysical perspective (however haphazard the actual process of discovery may have been); rather, he approached his work with a series of clear literary principles in place, principles that created the conditions in which his imagination could roam freely and discover the implicit orderliness of Middle-Earth and her tales. “For Tolkien,” Pezzini writes, “literature not only comes from the human mind, but also involves some form of participation of and in God’s creative power.” Tolkien was truly sub-creating; he was creating under the auspices of principles that, as long as he submitted to them, gave him the freedom to explore and discover things he never expected while maintaining a remarkable underlying stability and consistency in his work.
Pezzini identifies the four principles of Tolkien’s literary work as 1) artistic gratuitousness, 2) authorial detachment, 3) literary cloaking, 4) and narrative parallelism. He dedicates one chapter to each of these principles, demonstrating how each influenced Tolkien’s own creative process. He cites letters, lectures, interviews, and essays to show that Tolkien consciously submitted his work to these principles, and he annotates specific moments from The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, The Silmarillion, and various Unfinished Tales to show each principle at work.
The result is both delightful and scholarly, a clear and accessible demonstration of Pezzini’s theory that does not drag because it is speckled with such lovely Tolkienian moments as the mystery of “the cats of Queen Berúthiel” (a mystery as much to Tolkien as to us!), Gandalf’s evocative last words, and the curious changes in narrative register throughout the Lord of the Rings trilogy that reveal much about the characters of the books. Anyone who reveres Tolkien as a storyteller will enjoy Pezzini’s work, despite its scholarly nature.
But the ideal audience for Tolkien and the Mystery of Literary Creation is the Tolkien skeptic: the writer or critic who just isn’t convinced that fairy tales, children’s stories, or fantasies can have much literary value. Much of the skepticism toward so-called genre literature—fantasy, science fiction, horror, romance, mystery, and the like—is merited because these categories lend themselves to mass-produced, plot-driven pulp novels. But Pezzini ably proves that the fantasy genre, in the hands of a master, can be as luminous and language-focused as any other. As a dedicated reader of the greats of genre fiction, like Gene Wolfe’s science fiction and the mysteries of Dorothy Sayers, I hope Pezzini’s readers return to other genres with an open mind after seeing how much there is to learn from Tolkien’s literary theory.
Language as Gift, Not Machine
What is particularly moving about Pezzini’s book is the intimate look it grants us at a writer who reveled in the act of writing, from the motions of moving a pen on paper, to the joy of experimenting with sounds and symbols to create new, highly charged words. Moreover, the textures and layers of his work were as revelatory to him as to the closest reader. The best chapter in the book is chapter 6, “The Next Stage: The Death of the Author and the Effoliation of Creation.” Here, Pezzini writes,
For Tolkien, literature—its origins, processes, and purpose—cannot be reduced to something that can be fully described in analytical terms. Instead, literature is a “mystery,” which involves the participation of another mysterious Entity.
This conviction has grave implications for authors, Pezzini writes: “To accept and acknowledge this mysterious relationship is the core drama for the human sub-creator, as such recognition requires a form of authorial self-denial—a ‘death.’” This absolute submission of the author to the demands of his work is a moral, psychological, and spiritual task as much as a literary one. And, as Pezzini goes on to show in chapter 7, it brings astonishing rewards to the author willing to undergo this “death.”
It is startling that it has taken so long for Tolkien to be treated as a literary figure—he was, after all, first and foremost interested in language. But perhaps, in the spirit of Tolkien’s own conviction that there is a Master at work behind all things, Pezzini’s revelation of the literary theory and principles undergirding these popular tales comes at just the right time. As literature faces the single greatest threat it has ever confronted in the form of so-called artificial intelligence, it is vital for writers—and readers—to remember the importance of loving their material. Only a writer who, like Tolkien, takes a true, gratuitous delight in language itself stands a chance of being able to persist in creating work that is genuinely artistic, spontaneous, and luminous.
The heart of Tolkien’s literary theory is this: literature, the act of writing, of working with language, is a deeply human and salvific task. To work with language and to be willing to be changed by language is to enter into a profound mystery. Language is not a machine for us to control but a gift for us to steward; used properly, it can be a means of discovery and of grace. If readers take nothing from Tolkien and the Mystery of Literary Creation but this, their time will have been well used.
