A Sense of Tales Untold

Exploring the Edges of Tolkien's Literary Canvas

Peter Grybauskas

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781631014659
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Exploring the uncanny perception of depth in Tolkien's writing and world-building

A Sense of Tales Untold examines the margins of J. R. R. Tolkien's work: the frames, edges, allusions, and borders between story and un-story and the spaces between vast ages and miniscule time periods. The untold tales that are simply implied or referenced in the text are essential to Tolkien's achievement in world-building, Peter Grybauskas argues, and counter the common but largely spurious image of Tolkien as a writer of bloated prose. Instead, A Sense of Tales Untold highlights Tolkien's restraint—his ability to check the pen to great effect.

The book begins by identifying some of Tolkien's principal sources of inspiration and his contemporaries, then summarizes theories and practices of the literary impression of depth. The following chapters offer close readings of key untold tales in context, ranging from the shadowy legends at the margins of The Lord of the Rings to the nexus of tales concerning Túrin Turambar, the great tragic hero of the Elder Days. In his frequent retellings of the Túrin legend, Tolkien found a lifelong playground for experimentation with untold stories.

"A story must be told or there'll be no story, yet it is the untold stories that are most moving, " wrote Tolkien to his son during the composition of The Lord of the Rings, cutting straight to the heart of the tension between storytelling and world-building that animates his work. From the most straightforward form of an untold tale—an omission—to vast and tangled webs of allusions, Grybauskas highlights this tension. A Sense of Tales Untold engages with urgent questions about interpretation, adaptation, and authorial control, giving both general readers and specialists alike a fresh look at the source material of the ongoing "Tolkien phenomenon."

Chapter One

TOLKIEN AND THE “FUNDAMENTAL
LITERARY DILEMMA”

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter;
—John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”

Where the stream is clear, not too much scriveners’ preciseness: vomit up ink to trouble the waters.
—E. R. Eddison, Mistress of Mistresses

In January 1945, near the end of World War II and about midway through the long gestation period of The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien wrote to his son Christopher describing a “fundamental literary dilemma”:¹ “A story must be told or there’ll be no story, yet it is the untold stories that are most moving. I think you are moved by Celebrimbor because it conveys a sudden sense of endless untold stories: mountains seen far away, never to be climbed, distant trees … never to be approached—or if so only to become ‘near trees’”² (Letters, 110–11). “How to tell the untold,” as Vladimir Brljak puts it—or, perhaps, untell the told—“was Tolkien’s fundamental literary dilemma” (2010, 19).³ Throughout his career, Tolkien brought to this challenge an impressive playbook of tools, tricks, and devices that, with a nod to the letter, I call untold tales: the gaps, enigmas, allusions, digressions, omissions, ellipses, and loose ends that pepper his narratives.

The mid-1940s was not a time of idle chitchat between father and son. Writing to his aunt Jane Neave years later, Tolkien reflects on the period in which he wrote of his dilemma to Christopher—a dark one historically as well as a challenging one for Tolkien the writer and father. The Lord of the Rings was “revealing endless new vistas—and I wanted to finish it, but the world was threatening. And I was dead stuck. … It was not until Christopher was carried off to S. Africa that I forced myself to write Book IV” (Letters, 321). By making peace in a sense with untold tales—seeking a resolution to his fundamental dilemma—Tolkien found a way to keep his story going.

In addition to the name Celebrimbor, the letter to Christopher also cites some of Gandalf’s remarks about the Palantír as examples that were evidently successful in evoking a feeling of untold stories with its attendant “heart-racking sense of the vanished past.” Later in this chapter, I will briefly consider them both as a foundation on which to build the more robust investigations of particular untold tales in later chapters.

But before delving into these examples, this chapter will first explore the contexts in which untold tales develop, their theoretical foundations in Tolkien’s scholarly work and other writings, and some significant models and contemporaries. In the first place, it should be noted that Tolkien’s efforts to resolve the paradox of the untold story certainly predate his work on The Lord of the Rings—indeed they persist throughout his entire legendarium.⁴ From the early work of The Book of Lost Tales and the first extant texts of the legend of Beren and Lúthien, we might note Tinúviel’s song, with its invocation of a catalog of name-dropped wonders (both known and unknown): “the beards of the Indrafangs, the tail of Carcaras, the body of Glórund the drake, the bole of Hirilorn, and the sword of Nan she named” (BLT II, 19).

The Hobbit, too, shows a marked interest in the problem.⁵ C. S. Lewis’s review in the Times Literary Supplement highlighted its sense of “a world that seems to have been going on long before we stumbled into it,” as well as its impression that the author withholds much about his invented world and its denizens ([1937] 2013). Professor Tolkien, he wrote, “obviously knows much more about them than he needs for this tale.”⁶ Lewis cites no examples, but it does not take much to find them: from Gandalf’s mysterious “other business (which does not come into this tale),” to Bilbo’s delight in carrying a sword from Gondolin, made “for the goblin-wars of which so many songs had sung” (H, 178, 66).⁷

Lewis’s enthusiastic and insightful review touches on what is perhaps the mainspring of Tolkien’s literary project—its sense of hidden depth, which has been the subject of a good deal of scholarly attention in the intervening years. Chief among these commentators has been T. A. Shippey, who declared that “the literary quality Tolkien valued above all was the ‘impression of depth’” (2003, 228). Shippey clarifies how this sense of depth is largely “Beowulfian” in inspiration, drawing from Tolkien’s lifelong professional engagement and personal enjoyment of the Old English Beowulf. Shippey’s groundbreaking work on Tolkien dates at least as far back as his article “Creation from Philology in The Lord of the Rings,” where he notes “that the lore with which the trilogy is studded works overwhelmingly to produce that sense of depth and consistency” so unique to Tolkien’s writing (1979, 299).

Other scholars, too, have taken up the study of depth in Tolkien’s works. Gergely Nagy’s (2003) “The Great Chain of Reading” is a remarkable consideration of intertextuality across versions of the Túrin legend, shedding a light on Tolkien’s mythopoeic ambitions and effects. Michael D. C. Drout, Namiko Hitotsubashi, and Rachel Scavera (2014) turn to corpus analysis and empirical data for their study of “Tolkien’s Creation of the Impression of Depth.” Along the way they offer a concise summary of four factors generally accepted as ingredients in Tolkien’s recipe for depth:

(1) the vast size and intricate detail of the background Tolkien created for his imagined world; (2) the ways he refers to this background material through seemingly casual and incomplete allusion; (3) the logical gaps and apparent inconsistencies in the stories; and (4) the variations in style within given texts. (167)

This project makes for a fascinating companion to Nagy’s work, though it differs from my own work in its emphasis on verifiable allusions rather than untold tales as well as “distant” rather than close reading.

The subject of untold tales more specifically has not altogether escaped scholarly attention. John D. Rateliff’s “And All the Days of Her Life Are Forgotten: The Lord of the Rings as Mythic Prehistory” lays important groundwork for the elegiac effects of Tolkien’s preoccupation with lost tales, noting that “a sense of loss is always pervasive in all Tolkien’s work…. As a medieval scholar and above all as a philologist, Tolkien was keenly aware of just how much we have lost of our cultural heritage” (2006, 80).

Rateliff, in “‘A Kind of Elvish Craft,’” has also studied Tolkien’s prose style and its ability to engage the reader imaginatively, suggesting that “Tolkien deliberately withholds … detail … so that the reader is nudged into providing it” (2009, 6). Likewise, Steve Walker, in The Power of Tolkien’s Prose, argues that the “deliberate construction of fictive blank spaces … might be the consummate touch of Tolkien’s artistic encouragement of reader subcreation. Omission in his fiction becomes not passive but provocative, a sort of ultimate understatement” (2009, 165–66).

The present work owes a debt to all these scholars and more. Besides focusing particularly on those liminal spaces I call untold tales, my project distinguishes itself by its focus on the dialogue outlined in my introductory discussion of Tolkien’s theory of the edges of the canvas. While we have a foundation for what the impression of depth is—and what inspires and engenders it in Tolkien’s work—there is work to be done still to understand how this sense of depth colors and transforms our reading. This book will seek to fill some of these gaps, but it will do so selectively—a complete theory of and guide to untold tales is beyond my skill, and would possibly run counter to the spirit of the project. In the end, maybe the best words come from Paul Kocher, who, without recourse to any of the vast catalog of posthumous publications edited by Christopher Tolkien, noted, quite rightly: “The art of fantasy flourishes on reticence” (1977, 5).

Despite his celebrated/lambasted attention to minutiae, Tolkien understood when to check his pen and create space for untold tales. This opening chapter surveys Tolkien’s lifelong engagement with the theory and practice of untold tales, argues for the centrality of this engagement, and places Tolkien’s efforts in this regard within the broader context of his medieval models and contemporaries.

Perhaps anticipating the sort of critical responses he would receive for producing a work of fantasy for adults, Tolkien on several occasions demonstrated a feel for the tension between elaboration and economy, and a cognizance of the dangers of bloated prose, expressing doubts about the habit of overelaboration. In a letter written to Naomi Mitchison in April 1954, just prior to the publication of The Fellowship of the Ring, Tolkien probed the “clash” between a desire for exhaustive detail and what he came to understand as an equally important need to suppress it: “As a story, I think it is good that there should be a lot of things unexplained (especially if an explanation actually exists)…. even in a mythical Age there must be some enigmas, as there always are” (Letters, 174).

Some months later, in a letter to Hugh Brogan of September 1954, he returned to the subject, noting that much “of the ‘fascination’ [of The Lord of the Rings] consists in the vistas of yet more legend and history, to which this work does not contain a full clue” (Letters, 185). Then, in a letter of March 1955 to publisher Rayner Unwin, Tolkien once more expressed an awareness of the tension, this time with regard to the supplementary material to accompany The Return of the King. He warned that readers “who enjoy the book as an ‘heroic romance’ only, and find ‘unexplained vistas’ part of the literary effect, will neglect the appendices, very properly.” While he confessed that indulgence in ancillary detail was for him (and, judging by the fan letters, for many others) “fatally attractive,” still he was unsure whether “the tendency to treat the whole thing as a kind of vast game is really good” (Letters, 210).

Many such examples of this fatal attraction, for Tolkien and his readers, follow in the collected Letters. Amid a lengthy treatise drafted in response to a question on the gift-giving practices of Hobbits, Tolkien wryly notes that “the giving of information always opens still further vistas,”⁸ before rambling on for several more pages on the (somewhat) related subject of familial structures in Hobbit society (Letters, 293).

The clamoring for lore—and the attendant frustration when it is withheld—is frequently dramatized in The Lord of the Rings as well. Merry confesses to having seen Bilbo’s “secret book,” lamenting, “But I have only had one rapid glance, and that was difficult to get…. I should like another look” (FR, I, v, 105). An exasperated Gandalf seems a mouthpiece for Tolkien facing the steady stream of fan inquiries: “Mercy! … If the giving of information is to be the cure of your inquisitiveness, I shall spend all the rest of my days in answering you. What more do you want to know?” (TT, III, ii, 599).

Tolkien remained a generous writer of letters and revealed—or even developed—much previously unpublished lore therein. Yet in his fiction, the laconic narrators and lore-masters harness the power of suggestion and exploit the payoff of untold tales. In this regard, his training as a philologist and a scholar well versed in old literatures stood him in good stead.

DEEP ROOTS: TOLKIEN’S SCHOLARLY
INTEREST IN UNTOLD TALES

Sadly, Tolkien never made a definitive study of literary depth or untold tales, though he does appear to flirt with the idea in his work on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: brief musings on “this flavor, this atmosphere, this virtue that such rooted works have” are tantalizingly cut off—this “is not the kind of thing about which I wish to speak today” (MC, 72). Yet his sustained interest in the subject is unquestionable, and we can, with some labor, trace through his work a number of insights into his thinking on untold tales.

Chief in this regard must be Tolkien’s extended explorations of literary depth, beginning with “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.” Beowulf, Shippey notes, not coincidentally, is a poem “absolutely full … of … ‘lost tales’” (2010). Tolkien’s lecture to the British Academy, which argued for the poem’s artistic value and asserted the legitimate merit of the monsters at its center, is seen as a turning point in the field. Drout has suggested that the argument may have been too successful, and that in fact Tolkien might very well regret some of its impact on the field, particularly in squashing inquiry into the “outer edges,” the historical and legendary references that were peripheral to the main action of the poem but had received the lion’s share of attention before Tolkien’s entrance into the conversation.⁹ Drout’s clarification is an important point for a study of untold tales: for what Tolkien really suggests is not that the lost tales of Beowulf are unimportant but that their value is much greater when read not for their own sake but in terms of their relation to the fairy story at the heart of the poem. Tolkien’s own untold tales, as I hope to demonstrate throughout this book, were not world-building for world-building’s sake alone but are often shaped to suit the purposes of the stories to which they are attached.

In the lecture, Tolkien memorably describes Beowulf’s as “illusion of surveying a past … that itself had depth and reached backward…. This impression of depth is an effect and a justification of the use of episodes and allusions to old tales” (MC, 27). Elsewhere in the text, Tolkien depicts the primary and subsidiary action of the poem in spatial terms; it is a “great scene, hung with tapestries woven of ancient tales of ruin” (2006, 18). In additional lecture commentary on the poem, this sense of depth in Beowulf crosses both time and space: it is “like a play in a room through the windows of which a distant view can be seen over a large part of the English traditions about the world of their original home” (B, 254).

Such depth is compounded by layers: the Beowulf poet and his audience are looking back on days already long gone, “they are memories already in that day of a far past caught and coloured in the shells and amber of tradition, and refashioned by the jeweler of a later day” (BC, 74–75).

And for modern readers the experience is twice removed, though not, perhaps, less poignant: Beowulf’s funeral is for us “a memory brought over the hills, an echo of an echo” (MC, 33).

A fascination with depth appears also in “On Fairy-stories,” which had its start as an Andrew Lang lecture at the University of St. Andrews in 1939, revised and published in 1947. The essay mounts a defense of fairy tale (and fantasy) in part by redefining the genre as one built not on a quota of magical creatures but around the imaginary world of Faërie, the perilous realm. Tolkien emphasizes throughout the essay the concept of sub-creation, his own peculiar brand of world-building. Vastness and depth are hallmarks of the world conjured up by a sub-creator: “The realm … is wide and deep and high” (MC, 109). One of the desires satisfied by these tales “is to survey the depths of space and time”; the successful fairy-story, Tolkien argues, opens a “door on Other Time” (116, 129). Yet full satiety of these primordial desires is not granted us, for as Tolkien makes clear from the beginning of the essay, the reader is only a wanderer “(or trespasser)” in the otherworld of Faërie, whose “gates should be shut and the keys be lost” if we ask too many questions (109).

Some two decades later, with The Lord of the Rings long in the rearview mirror, Tolkien returns in his Smith of Wootton Major essay to grapple with many of the technical fine points first explored in “On Fairy-stories.” Naturally, the depth of Faërie and the experience of traveling through it are reconsidered here. Tolkien muses: “And when it comes to Fairy-land! That has no known limits, and no maps. Travellers have to do without them—probably the best thing” (SWM, 92).

Returning to “The Monsters and the Critics,” Tolkien stresses that this sense of boundless depth is largely illusory: “The illusion of historical truth and perspective … is largely a product of art…. The lovers of poetry can safely study the art, but the seekers after history must beware lest the glamour of Poesis overcome them” (MC, 7). This caution—beware the glamour of Poesis—recalls the conflicts described by Tolkien to his publishers in preparing the appendices for publication.

To put it another way, the impression of depth is in large part founded on withholding information. Tolkien had singled out the following lines from the conclusion of the Kalevala (1835), Elias Lönnrot’s collection of Finnish folklore, ...