Tolkien Criticism Today, Revisited

Dennis Wilson Wise reviews two books on Tolkien and the challenges Tolkien studies faces when engaging the wider discipline.

By Dennis Wilson WiseSeptember 25, 2024

• SF

• Literary Criticism

ABOUT NINE YEARS AGO, the Los Angeles Review of Books started something of a minor controversy—a kerfuffle, even—among certain scholars in the Tolkien community. In “Tolkien Criticism Today,” Norbert Schürer reviewed seven recent books in Tolkien studies, and although his individual comments were sound, what riled folks up was his larger claim—nothing more, really, than a logical extension of his analysis—that, with some exceptions, our subfield was in a “sad state”: rife with weak writing, poor quality control, and underdeveloped arguments.

Granted, Schürer could have phrased things more delicately. After all, academic critics have spent decades looking down their noses at fantasy, and even if the genre now has gone mainstream, this legacy still inspires some defensiveness. The academic job market, for one thing, still reflects that old elitism, but our instinctive wariness is especially triggered when “outsiders” like Schürer, whose research focuses on the long 18th century, start holding forth on Tolkien in a public way. In response, several Tolkienists issued rebuttals, but many of their points only reinforced the original critique. In one telling example, the three authors of “Tolkien Criticism Unbound” protest that Schürer is comparing our subfield not to scholarship on other fantasy authors but to scholarship in literary studies in general.

For myself, I wouldn’t want to hang a tenure case on that line of thinking. It reeks of big fish, small pond. Yet it raises a competing complaint, another frustration I’ve heard expressed by fantasy scholars outside of Tolkien circles. Although my subfield is large and welcoming, this grumble goes, we’re also quite insular. Our work remains crushingly author-centric. Too often, articles and books on Tolkien ignore the debates and methodologies embroiling the wider discipline. On one hand, this insularity does support some first-rank research in things like biography, source studies, textual editing, genetic criticism, Tolkienian linguistics, and direct historical influence—what some call the “old” historicism. But our insularity harms us in other ways. Let me use an analogy from another small, tight-knit academic cohort: James Joyce studies. Whenever a Joycean issues a new book, other scholars of modernism take note. The same, though, almost never happens with new work by Tolkienists. Because we too often bypass key debates within literary studies writ large, scholars in other fields, including science fiction and fantasy, see little reason to pay us much heed.

There are several reasons for this insularity, but our separateness highlights why two recent books on history and Tolkien should command our attention. The first is Nicholas Birns’s bluntly titled The Literary Role of History in the Fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien (Routledge, 2023), and the second is Representing Middle-earth: Tolkien, Form, and Ideology by Robert T. Tally Jr. (McFarland, 2023). Now, as James Gifford and others have shown, most scholars of fantasy in general have tended to borrow heavily from Marxist critical precepts inherited from science fiction studies, a field that arose slightly earlier in time. For these scholars, the concept of history (or History) obviously matters a great deal. So when two prominent Tolkienists take up history as a subject, there naturally appears a golden opportunity for some real cross-field dialogue, a rare chance to address the conversations on fantasy and Tolkien happening outside our own narrow sliver of academia.

In this regard, at least, Birns achieves mixed results. In one sense, sure—The Role of History in Tolkien (as I’ll abbreviate the title) is another book on Tolkien that focuses strictly on the author himself, or at least his legendarium: the collection of texts comprising Middle-earth’s fictive history. At the same time, this isn’t Birns’s first rodeo. His prior work shows a deep immersion in literary studies as a field, including subjects such as Australian literature, spatiality, medievalism, and intellectual history. In the latter category especially, his Theory After Theory: An Intellectual History of Literary Theory From 1950 to the Early 21st Century (2010) astutely examines the legacy of “high theory” from the 1980s and 1990s. Birns’s sense that we occupy an era “after theory” most likely explains, in this new book, why he shies away from treating history as a Marxist or new historicist would: either as a material dialectical process or as a fragmentary, heterogeneous text. Instead, Birns is a deliberate throwback to historical positivism. Facts, events, and historical actors are treated like discreet entities, and Birns modestly avoids grand narratives or universalizing starting points. Rather, he believes that we can gather important insights by drawing sharp parallels between our world’s history and the fictional history of Middle-earth.

This is an odd approach to take, and occasionally Birns succumbs to the natural pitfalls. For instance, according to appendix B in The Lord of the Rings, the northern Dúnedain kingdom of Arnor split into three petty kingdoms in year 861 of the Third Age. After some questionable numerology, Birns observes that this is almost the same year (862 AD) when Charlemagne’s kingdom of the Franks split into three realms. Even if we accept this dating as significant, though—technically, the Carolingians partitioned their kingdom on two separate occasions, neither in 862—it seems strange that Tolkien, had he intended an actual parallel, wouldn’t have made Arnor’s division correspond to an exact real-world date.

Despite such missteps, though, Birns treats his readers to a fascinating array of historical debates. His chapters focus on topics ranging from the questionable value of Hittite as an Indo-European language, the “Germanness” of the Gothic peoples, and the cultural pluralism of the Byzantines to the degree of medievalism in Tolkien’s Riders of Rohan. Birns’s final chapter deserves special mention for braving a discussion of philology via Tolkien, Erich Auerbach, and Edward Said—a trio not discussed often enough by Tolkienists.

Of these debates, Birns often takes the more challenging or counterintuitive side. For instance, most Tolkienists agree that Tolkien based his Rohirrim on the Old English kingdom of Mercia. Instead, Birns sees the Rohirrim as semimodern—not medieval—through their “civilizing” contact with Gondor. To say the least, this view enjoys questionable textual support, but as one goes through Birns’s book, a clear pattern begins to emerge. Over the last few years, the Tolkien community has endured its own shadow version of the Sad Puppies fiasco. In 2021, certain right-leaning fans (and at least one senior scholar) loudly decried the “wokeism” of a diversity-themed seminar hosted by the Tolkien Society, and with even greater toxicity, some people in Tolkien fandom have virulently attacked the multiracial casting in The Rings of Power, an Amazon Prime Video series that first aired in September 2022.

This is the cultural moment into which Birns wades, but for someone hoping to make an important political intervention, he frequently stumbles over several small, self-deprecating asides. One example involves race and representation. Before launching into the argument, Birns explicitly denies that, as a white male from an Anglo-American cultural background, he is “trying to act as an authority on those subjects.” Here, Birns is plainly attempting to acknowledge his positionality, a move often called for by progressive scholars, but his good intentions catch The Role of History in Tolkien in a performative quandary. They let right-wing crusaders dismiss his arguments out of hand; after all, this book wasn’t written by “an expert.”

But of course Birns isn’t really trying to show wayward young fascists the light. His real audience is the academic Left, and despite his principled humility, Birns clearly wants to provide his fellow leftists with scholarly ammunition against the anti-diversity crowd. Thus his various scholarly takes consist mainly in quashing claims of “Germanic primitivism” in Tolkien. Birns downplays not only Rohan’s clear connection to Mercia—the Old English people, remember, were originally Germanic—but also Tolkien’s overall admiration for the Gothic peoples. Additionally, Birns alleges that Tolkien took multicultural Byzantium as his model for Gondor, not imperial (and eventually Ostrogothic) Rome. Even more pointedly, although Birns laments how little Tolkien knew about the “traditions and cultural memory of non-European peoples,” he nevertheless claims to see some African influence on the legendarium. Allegedly, Tar-Míriel of Númenor bears a passing resemblance to Empress Zewditu of Ethiopia.

Even for readers who cheer his goals, these connections can seem far-fetched. If you want to defend The Rings of Power for “casting a woman of color in the role of the woman who should have been queen of Númenor,” for example, why not simply mention Númenor’s obvious roots in ancient Egyptian culture? Unfortunately, such strained parallels pervade The Role of History in Tolkien. Yet the core intuition behind Birns’s book remains solid. According to him, as important as Tolkien considered history, he never saw it as the “primal meaning or referent of his work.” Instead, Tolkien viewed history as a concrete series of dates and events. In this way, Birns’s historical localism—his positivism—follows in a precedent set by his source author.

That point will be useful to remember as we turn to Tally’s radically different book. Unlike Birns, who thinks high theory has survived only in residual form, Tally, a former student of Fredric Jameson, proudly proclaims his credentials as a card-carrying Marxist literary critic. So long as global capitalism and repressive world-systems remain in place, he believes, Marxist criticism has its place. Yet what makes Representing Middle-earth such a breath of fresh air is its uniqueness. Tally is something of an academic unicorn, at least in speculative fiction circles: a savvy Marxist critic … and an ardent admirer of J. R. R. Tolkien.

Given the long-standing antagonism between the two, Representing Middle-earth thus bridges both fields in a way few other critics could manage. Tally’s argument is refreshingly simple: Tolkien helps us think historically. Marxist critics have long bewailed the seemingly ahistorical archetypes of genre fantasy, but as Tally points out, The Lord of the Rings is literally inundated with historical depth. A key moment occurs on the stairs of Cirith Ungol when Sam Gamgee reflects that the “great tales never end.” When Sam suddenly recognizes himself as participating in one such great tale, Tolkien manages to render history both visible and knowable to its participants. The Lord of the Rings thus fulfills what Lyotard once called the “desire called Marx”: our collective wish to make sense of the world in terms of a narrative. Enhanced by such techniques as Tolkien’s deployment of multiple generic forms (myth, realism, fairy tale, and more), this narrativity enables readers to form “cognitive maps” that encompass a larger global system. Far from living for ourselves alone, Tally claims, Tolkien lets us see ourselves as historical beings.

By this account, then, there seems little reason not to accept Tolkien’s ready alignment with Marxist criticism. Each seems so compatible, in fact, that one nearly wonders at all the original fuss. Yet here we encounter a genuine oddity about Tally’s style. For someone who once wrote a book called For a Ruthless Critique of All That Exists, Tally seems remarkably hesitant to delve into any areas of authentic critical tension. He rarely criticizes. When talking about Jameson, for instance, Tally comes off almost like an acolyte, someone who agrees with everything his mentor says except that mentor’s famous disdain for fantasy fiction. Likewise, when citing fellow Tolkien scholars, he rarely challenges their positions in any but the most minor ways. Whereas Birns earnestly engages other scholars as the need arises, Tally’s general philosophy of citation seemingly consists of unequivocal positivity.

In other words, Tally reminds me of the jovial uncle at Thanksgiving family dinner, the one who keeps the peace between his cousins (the Tolkienists) and in-laws (the Marxists) by steering the conversation skillfully away from sore spots. Two representative instances concern religion and medievalism. As a subfield, Tolkien studies naturally includes quite a few medievalists and its fair share of theologians. Both groups have strengths and weaknesses as critics, yet Tally spends little time dissecting either. When he raises critical tension points, as he occasionally does, he swiftly swerves away. Soon after acknowledging the devout Catholicism underlying Tolkien’s world-building, for instance, Tally cheerfully dismisses this perspective by citing Jameson’s maxim that religion is one way—not the best way, obviously, but an attempt at least—of grasping historical and geographical systems on a global level.

I doubt many non-Marxists would take this dismissal so easily for granted, yet Tally pulls the same side step with medievalists. He suggests, rightly, that Tolkien renders the medieval and the archaic “real” to contemporary audiences, but by this he means that The Lord of the Rings enables readers to envision preindustrial social formations in a dialectical and materialist fashion—not quite what Tolkien himself, a medievalist with little sympathy for Marxism, had in mind. For Tally, though, while divine providence and Chaucer might be nice, Jamesonian Marxism is the One Hermeneutic to Rule Them All.

This presentist attitude is defensible, of course, but it does need defending, and at length, especially if half your audience consists of medievalists disinclined to view the entire Middle Ages as an adjunct to Jameson. Tally is too talented a critic not to see these tensions. Nonetheless, lamentably, Representing Middle-earth chronically leaves its arguments underdeveloped. Rarely does Tally press his points to their most far-reaching logical conclusions. He never extends his claims about historicity in The Lord of the Rings, for example, to the fantasy genre founded by Tolkien’s popularity. Given how rarely Tally cites fantasy scholars outside of Tolkien circles, I suspect his expertise simply does not extend far into this area. But here’s a fascinating question. If reading Tolkien encourages readers to think historically, what about reading Tolkien’s most slavish imitators, people like Robert Jordan and David Eddings? Does reading The Wheel of Time or The Belgariad help us think historically too?

The answer, I suspect, must be yes, but I’m skeptical that many (or any) Marxist critics, especially in science fiction studies, would take that claim lying down. Commercial mass-market fantasy … as subversive as Ursula K. Le Guin or China Miéville? Crazy. Yet how Tally or someone like him would handle the inevitable rejoinders remains a mystery.

Similarly, in The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981), Jameson claimed Marxism as the one master-code against which all other theories possess merely sectoral validity. How much, I wonder, would holding such a position affect research practices in Tolkien studies? After all, our best work doesn’t tend to be critical in the way demanded by Marxist praxis. Source studies, textual editing, biography … as methodologies go, all are relatively conservative. Should the university presses and trade presses, then, concentrate less on Tolkien-centric monographs and edited collections, books that rely overmuch on closely reading the primary sources in Tolkien’s legendarium (and spiced up, at most, by superficial gestures to other disciplines), or should they instead seek to publish those kinds of research that define fields and whose conclusions scholars outside Tolkien studies would find impactful? The answer seems obvious, but Tally, always the gentleman, refuses to name names. His book stops well short of reaching the boldest conclusions his theoretical stance might imply.

Overall, Tolkien studies is unique in that so much of our finest work hails from fan scholars, acafans, and independent researchers. However, our subfield’s incredible size also obscures its insularity. When academic disciplines move forward, they advance not only by accumulating facts and new primary materials but also by reflecting critically on their goals, methodologies, and sources. They engage sincerely with other subfields and disciplines. At day’s end, what Representing Middle-earth and The Role of History in Tolkien have in common is one great virtue: despite shortfalls in ambition or execution, Tally and Birns both firmly recognize and understand the world of literary studies beyond our own subfield. Yet to answer Norbert Schürer’s original comment about the “sad state” of Tolkien criticism—although we’re getting better, we’re not quite there … yet.