For various reasons I’ve had a couple different essays under my eyes this afternoon: “Epic Pooh” (Moorcock’s Titanic body-slam against Tolkien and other “high” fantasists) and Tolkien’s “On Fairy-Stories”.
All critical writing about fantasy needs to be taken with a pinch of salt. When the critics are themselves fantasists, you’d better have pounds of the stuff on hand. I’ve noted this before about Le Guin. She is, to my mind, the greatest stylist among modern fantasists. Her essay on style and fantasy, “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie”, is a must read. But, as I’ve argued elsewhere, she’s not infallible.
Clarke’s First Law is the relevant standard to apply here.
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
Replace “scientist” with “critic”/“scholar”/‘artist”/“writer” and you’ve got it. (Also be aware that in the now-distant day when Clarke was writing, “he” could be used of people in general, regardless of their natural gender, because personhood was gendered masculine. I don’t endorse this position; I just report it.)
Moorcock’s discussion of Tolkien (and the style of much high fantasy) is worth reading, whether you agree with it or not.
The sort of prose most often identified with “high” fantasy is the prose of the nursery-room. It is a lullaby; it is meant to soothe and console. It is mouth-music. It is frequently enjoyed not for its tensions but for its lack of tensions. It coddles; it makes friends with you; it tells you comforting lies. It is soft.
He doesn’t like it.
And I guess I get that, especially given the date of Moorcock’s original essay, a time when bookstands were groaning under the weight of Tolkienian knockoffs. If Moorcock is less than fair to Tolkien, he’s certainly got the number of the Tolkienizers.
I would argue, though, that Tolkien himself has more than one string to his epic harp, and in particular when he’s writing about war (something that he, unlike most writers of heroic fantasy, experienced at its worst) we see him in a different mode.
Here’s Pippin in battle at the Black Gate of Mordor:
Like a storm <the orcs> broke upon the line of the men of Gondor, and beat upon helm and head, and arm and shield, as smiths hewing the hot bending iron. At Pippin’s side Beregond was stunned and overborne, and he fell; and the great troll-chief that smote him down bent over him, reaching out a clutching claw; for these fell creatures would bite the throats of those that they threw down.
Then Pippin stabbed upwards, and the written blade of Westernesse pierced through the hide and went deep into the vitals of the troll, and his black blood came gushing out. He toppled forward and came crashing down like a falling rock, burying those beneath him. Blackness and stench and crushing pain came upon Pippin, and his mind fell away into a great darkness.
’So it ends as I guessed it would,’ his thought said, even as it fluttered away; and it laughed a little within him ere it fled, almost gay it seemed to be casting off at last all doubt and care and fear.
Pippin isn’t actually dying; he just thinks he is. But it’s not a coincidence that Tolkien sends his most childlike characters (Pippin, Merry, Sam) into the most terrible places. Tolkien had been one of those children. As Tolkien remarks grimly and memorably, “By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead.”
Moorcock is philosophically opposed to consolation, which for Tolkien is a major feature of fantastic storytelling. These are both legitimate points of view. But I would deny that Tolkien turns his eye away from grief and suffering and loss—the things people need consolation for.
Should people suffering from such things (and that’s everyone who lives, sooner or later) be offered any kind of consolation?
Absolutely not. Let them toughen up! Whatever it is, there’s worse coming.
Or maybe: No. It’s insolence and cowardice to babble chipper advice to someone suffering from terrible grief and pain.
Or maybe yes. If you think you can fairly offer it, if someone needs it, if it will do any damn good in a world without enough good in it, then maybe yes.
It’s not a question with just one correct answer. But as I get older, and fatter, and more corrupt, and as the world grows worse and worse, I have more and more sympathy for people who just want escape: for an hour, for longer, forever.
It’s not crazy for people who seek that kind of consolation to look for it in fantasy. And it’s not dishonest or corrupt for fantasists to try and offer it.
But with style, definitely. There’s a great line in Stan Freberg’s The United States States of America. A square general is asking a hipster fife player, “Do you want the war to end on a note of triumph or disaster?” And the fife player says, “Either way, man, just so it swings.”
That’s the only real rule for style. Either it works as verbal music or it doesn’t.
