WORLD OF MIDDLE EARTH

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33816, 12 April 1975, Page 10

WORLD OF MIDDLE EARTH

Tolkien’s World. By Randel Helms. Thames and Hudson. 155 pp. Notes and Index. N.Z. price: $7.20.

A critical work which begins its first sentence by talking about “literature’s pivotal moments” will have to struggle very hard to recover any respect from its readers. When the subject is as fashionable and important as Bilbo and Frodo the deadly techniques of critical analysis will seem to border on blasphemy for those who have lived in the world of “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings.”

Fortunately, it emerges slowly that Mr Helms has a fine sense of humour — a rare quality in an American academic considering his own work. He is quite capable of admitting how stilted and artificial must be any attempt to reduce Tolkien’s art to a discussion of its literary progenitors and philosophy. For that is entirely the author’s point. Fantasy, far from demanding the willing suspension of disbelief, must create a complete, self-contained, and believable world which is logically consistent in its own terms. When fantasy succeeds — and few who have

read “The Lord of the Rings” would question that Middle Earth is such a world — it has a reality all its own. different from, but in no way inferior to the “ordinary” world of men. • Mr Helms suggests that in telling the children’s tale of Bilbo, Tolkien stumbled on a saga, and a world, which quite escaped his intentions. Tolkien admits as much in his essay on “Stories.” The full implications of Bilbo’s quest and return had to be worked out, through Frodo, on a much vaster scale for adults. The result deepens, rather than clouds, men’s vision of reality. Frodo’s rejection of the gift of ultimate power and knowledge in the One Ring of Power may be interpreted in many ways. Mr Helms explores several of them and his readers should enjoy the process. One cannot help feeling, however, that Mr Helms, like Bilbo, went only a little way on the journey before he sat down to write about it. Tolkien still awaits his critical Frodo who will have to attempt a much vaster journey of exploration. With Mr Helms, sensitive and perceptive as he is, we are hardly beyond the borders of the Shire. But that, after all, was the heart of Tolkien’s world.