this closure is for our benefit. As readers we are positioned to be dependent upon what we are told, but both Tolkien and Lewis recognize that if the internal narrative is to convince, it must be sealed from within, not without.
Many of the “histories” we receive are oral retellings, which might alert the reader to unreliability. In the hands of Tolkien and Lewis, however, they do the opposite. The first example is when Gandalf visits Frodo to tell him of what the Ring portends, “ ‘Ah!’ said Gandalf. “That is a very long story. The beginnings lie back in the Black Years, which only the lore-masters now remember’ ” (Fellowship, “The Shadow of the Past” 60).22 We then segue rapidly into the formal, the gloomy atmosphere conjured up by the capitals in the sentences. And it is here that language is used to convince us: “The Enemy still lacks one thing to give him strength and knowledge to beat down all resistance, break the last defences, and cover all the lands in a second darkness. He lacks the One Ring” (“The Shadow of the Past” 60). There is no space for doubt here, no question that there might not be an enemy. Others may doubt later in the book—particularly in the bar at Bree—but no one who has spoken to Gandalf will do so, just as the word of Aslan is by its very nature the Truth. Whereas Lewis achieves it by positing Aslan as a sacred figure, who cannot be challenged, Tolkien constructs a style that defies the doubter. The style shifts: it becomes impersonal, in part because Sauron’s name may not be spoken, but also to give the sense of a Built Past. From Strider:
In those days the Great Enemy, of whom Sauron was but a servant, dwelt in Angband in the North, and the Elves of the West coming back to Middle-earth made war upon him to regain the Silmarils which he had stolen; and the fathers of Men aided the Elves. But the Enemy was victorious and Barahir was slain, and Beren escaping through great peril came over the Mountains of Terror into the hidden Kingdom of Thingol in the forest of Neldoreth. There he beheld Luthien singing and dancing in a glade. (Fellowship, “A Knife in the Dark” 206)
The cadences are those of oral telling. The very seamlessness of it maintains the momentum that makes it sound formal but also sung. The narrative use of “and,” as in Old Testament language and the narratives of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, provides the story with extra authenticity. Language in Tolkien is directed to the telling, that they be seen to be told. Stories, not just language, are in and of themselves convincing. When Bombadil speaks,
The hobbits did not understand his words, but as he spoke, they had a vision as it were of a great expanse of years behind them, like a vast shadowy plain over which there strode shapes of Men, tall and grim with bright swords, and last came one with a star on his brow. Then the vision faded, and they were back in the sunlit world. (Fellowship, “Fog on the Barrow-downs” 157)
The vision compels belief, and this visionary element is present whenever History is retold. As reportage it takes on elements of the club narrative: impervious and protected by the reputation of the teller, and reinforced by the isolation in which the story is told. In contrast, we can consider the role of demotic language in Lord of the Rings. Although much information is delivered in formal storytelling sessions, many of the really significant decisions, observations, and pieces of information are actually exchanged in the low vernacular of the hobbits.
Sam, who operates as the voice of the narrator does in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, is the one who reminds us that he is a real person moving through the fantasy. Thus while Aragorn or Gandalf worry about the historical significance of actions taken or not taken, Sam reminds us of the realities of a cross-country trek, even down to a forgotten rope. This one small paragraph, and others like it, is crucial to the success of the quest. That it is told in an unspectacular style, drawing no attention to itself save as a bit of comic business, is marvelous. Hayakawa talks of the “value of unoriginal remarks” as both mood setters, and ways in which to control an atmosphere (80–81). Tolkien has embraced this understanding: much of what is really going on is hidden by the high-flown rhetoric of the “politicians.” Nowhere is this understanding more evident than on page 419 where Sam is explaining Frodo to Pippin.
“Begging your pardon,” said Sam. “I don’t think you understand my master at all. He isn’t hesitating about which way to go. Of course not! What’s the good of Minas Tirith anyway? To him, I mean, begging your pardon, Master Boromir.” (Fellowship, “The Breaking of the Fellowship” 419)
Without deploying the ringing tones of authority, Sam cuts through the campfire discussion of politics, diplomacy, and strategy. But this change of voice is momentary. Elsewhere the book is dominated by the interpretive voice of Gandalf and Aragorn, who, while they may not control the movements of the hobbits, control their meaning. Later authors, however, have misunderstood the role of this material. Mistaken for an aspect of character, phatic discourse—the chats about cooking, about weather, the general reaffirmations of existence—becomes a mere attribute. Tolkien uses these moments to remind us what is real in both the metaphorical and fantastical sense.
If the role of the guide is increasing, and the understanding of the protagonist is increasingly molded by the presence of the guide, we as readers are also under increasing pressure to pay attention to the moral significance of landscape, that semiosis that encodes the feelings of actors and readers (Rifaterre 14). For both Lewis and Tolkien, landscape was validated as adventure and character in and of itself. Landscape for Lewis must have purpose: it is there to be useful and to be reacted to. When the children see the beaver house, “you at once thought of cooking and became hungrier than you were before” (69). Although the passage concludes with description of the rushing water, frozen as it falls, this apparently purely aesthetic description provides vital information about the nature and magnitude of the witch’s power. At the same time: “Edmund noticed something else. A little lower down the river there was another small river which came down another small valley to join it. And looking up that valley, Edmund could see two small hills, and he was almost sure they were the two hills which the White Witch had pointed out to him when he parted from her at the lamp-post that other day” (69).
Elsewhere, landscape is not expected to speak; it merely accompanies the events. Although the characters interact with the landscape it is in the sense that they act with and upon it. The landscape is there to be moved through. The “aliveness” of Lewis’s Narnian landscape with its dryads and hamadryads reduces the moral agency of the scenery: even in Prince Caspian (1951) where the land’s aliveness is most at stake, it is acted upon, it is not an actor. In contrast, Tolkien’s technique—and the one that will come to dominate the quest fantasy tradition—is to present the landscape as a participant in the adventure. It can indicate evil: “That view was somehow disquieting: so they turned from the sight and went down into the hollow circle”; “They felt as if a trap was closing about them” (Fellowship, “Fog on the Barrow-downs” 148, 149). The indication is that it is the landscape that actively traps them, pulling them down toward the barrow wights. Or, the landscape can simply influence: “The hearts of the hobbits rose again a little in spite of weariness: the air was fresh and fragrant, and it reminded them of the uplands of the Northfar-thing far away” (The Two Towers, “Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit” 257). Emulating a number of myth structures, Tolkien ties the land to the king/leader or to the virtue of the people: Gondor’s townlands “were rich, with wide tilth and many orchards, and homesteads there were with oast and garner, fold and byre, and many rills rippling through the green from the highlands down to Anduin” (Return of the King, “Minas Tirith” 22). Pippin describes the feeling of connection thus:
“One felt as if there was an enormous well behind them, filled up with the ages of memory and long, slow, steady thinking; but their surface was sparkling with the present; like sun shimmering on the outer leaves of a vast tree, or on the ripples of a very deep lake. I don’t know, but it felt as if something grew in the ground—asleep, you might say, or just feeling itself as something between root-tip and leaf-tip, between deep earth and sky had suddenly waked up, and was considering you with the same slow care that it had given to its own inside affairs for endless years.” (The
