In the beginning ...
The labors of Christopher Tolkien in his father's archive have been as dynastic and subterranean as the delvings of the dwarves in the Mines of Moria. He was bred for the task, in a sense. It was Christopher, the third son of the author of "The Lord of the Rings," who on cold evenings in Oxford, England, in the early 1930s, would huddle by the family stove and "listen motionless" (according to Humphrey Carpenter's "J.R.R. Tolkien") "as his father told him...about the elvish wars against the black power, and of how Beren and Luthien made their perilous journey to the very heart of Morgoth's stronghold."
It was Christopher, at the age of 20, who first drew up a map of Middle-earth, clarifying the geography of what was at that point an unfinished manuscript known only as "the new Hobbit." And it is Christopher who since his father's death in 1973 has overseen the posthumous publication of "The Silmarillion," the 12-volume "History of Middle-earth," and now "The Children of Hurin." Far from being a "new" Tolkien book, "The Children of Hurin" has been assembled from textual fragments dating to 1917, when Tolkien was recovering from trench fever contracted in wartime France, and tells a story that predates the action in "Lord of the Rings" by a good 6,000 years.
Christopher Tolkien, geographer of his father's myth-world, has now taken us almost to that world's limit. The story of Hurin, and of his children Turin and Nienor, and of the curse laid upon them by the archenemy Morgoth, are part of "The Book of Lost Tales," the work that Tolkien never completed but that formed the bedrock of his legendarium. With "The Children of Hurin" we are right at the imaginative genesis of Middle-earth: The moment at which Tolkien's unique mind, with the trenches and shattered woods of the Somme still hanging before it, went spiraling backwards into the misty millennia of an imagined antiquity.
This was not escapism: Tolkien's mythologizing was no more a flight from reality than William Blake's had been a century earlier, in works like "Europe, a Prophecy" and "The Four Zoas." On the contrary, it engaged reality on the grandest symbolic scale. Middle-earth is a realm of perpetual unease, warred over by forces of dark and light whose rhythmic clashes are the pulse of a fallen world. Beauty and wisdom, always under threat, reside with the Elves. Destruction issues from the throne of Morgoth, a demiurge who has more in common with Blake's Urizen than he does with Milton's Satan. Like Urizen, Morgoth is associated with metal, industry, slavery, the death of the imagination, and the exploitation and violation of nature: he dwells in the fortress of Angband, "the Hells of Iron."
Late in "The Children of Hurin" the warrior Dorlas suffers a failure of courage ("He sits shivering on the shore") that Tolkien's contemporaries would have recognized immediately as shell shock. To his admirer W.H. Auden, Tolkien confided that he was a writer "whose instinct is to cloak such self-knowledge as he has, and such criticisms of life as he knows it, under mythical and legendary dress." John Garth, in his 2003 book "Tolkien and the Great War," imagines the convalescent Tolkien in 1917, sitting up in bed with pen and paper, poised at the creation of a work that will either be called "Tuor and the Exiles of Gondolin" or "A Subaltern on the Somme." He did not, of course, write a trench memoir: The path he took went inward, and down, and it would require the faithful excavations of another Tolkien generation to see exactly how far he went.
And in the end... Well, that's all, folks. This edition of Cultural Studies -- the 33d -- is my last. Like the uncouth swain in Milton's "Lycidas," I rise at last and twitch my mantle blue: tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new. I have been most grateful during the 16-month life span of this column for your e-mailed thoughts and comments. When I wrote about something I didn't understand (audio technology, for example) you were quick to acquaint me with the limits of my knowledge. And when I gave a bit of airtime to someone not often featured in the Sunday papers, someone like John Fahey or Arthur Lee, you were equally quick with your expressions of delight and support. Certain of my columns got no response at all: They went out and vanished, soundlessly -- or rather there was the small, mental sound of the ether resealing itself behind them forever. If I could take back one thing, it would be the column about Michael Richards -- Kramer from "Seinfeld," as you may remember, who had a racist meltdown onstage at an LA comedy club. What possessed me to contribute to the already complete humiliation of a man who has made me laugh out loud at least twice a week for the past ten years? That aside, it's been a pleasure. Thank you all very much for reading.
James Parker lives in Brookline and has written for Ideas since 2002. E-mail cultural.studies@globe.com.
