The Happy Little Elves Grow Up

A couple of years back I re-read my favorite fantasy book from childhood, Julie Andrews' The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles. That was a mistake. It wasn't nearly so long, nor so rich, nor so wonderful, as in my memory.

In that same childhood, I quite enjoyed Tolkien's The Hobbit, vastly more than his "Lord of the Rings" trilogy (which took me roughly a decade to get through for the first time). Nowadays, I am most partial to his The Fellowship of the Ring, the most wonderful and fantastic of the three. Not that I dislike the second and third volumes; it's just that they're mainly adventure stories, and thus more prosaïc than fantastic. Anyway, I thought I would revisit The Hobbit, to see if it is more fantasy or adventure. In the event, it's a largely irrelevant question, because more than anything else it is a children's tale, which surprised me a bit.

Still, it is in this respect that it holds interest for mature readers of Tolkien in comparison with the "Lord of the Rings," mainly by virtue of the differences between the earlier and later works and what they imply about the development of Tolkien's conception of Middle Earth. For example, take magic: in the "L. o. t. R.," wizardry is serious business:

In the wavering firelight Gandalf seemed suddenly to grow: he rose up, a great menacing shape like the monument of some ancient king of stone set upon a hill. Stooping like cloud, he lifted a burning branch and strode to meet the wolves. They gave back before him. High in the air he tossed the blazing brand. It flared with a sudden white radiance like lightning; and his voice rolled like thunder.
     "Naur an edraith ammen! Naur dan i ngaurhoth!' he cried.
     There was a roar and a crackle, and the tree above burst into a leaf and a bloom of blinding flame.

"I could think of nothing to do but to try and put a shutting-spell on the door. I know many, but to do things of that kind rightly requires time, and even then the door can be broken by strength.
     "... It laid hold of the iron ring, and then perceived me and my spell.
     "What it was I cannot guess, but I have never felt such a challenge. The counter-spell was terrible. It nearly broke me. For an instant the door left my control and began to open! I had to speak a work of Command. That proved too great a strain. The door burst in pieces."

And Elvish 'magic' is so subtle that it seems more mystical than magical:

"Many things I can command the Mirror to reveal," she answered, "and to some I can show what they desire to see. But the mirror will also show things unbidden, and those are often stranger and more profitable than things which we wish to behold. What will see, if you leave the Mirror free to work, I cannot tell. For it shows things that were, and things that are, and things that yet may be. But which it is that he sees, even the wisest cannot always tell. Do you wish to look?"
     ...
     "And you?" she said, turning to Sam. "For this is what your folk would call magic, I believe; though I do not understand clearly what they mean; and they seem also to use the same word of the deceits of the Enemy. But this, if you will, is the magic of Galadriel."

For each they had provided a hood and cloak, made according to his size, of the light but warm silken stuff that the Galadrim wove. It was hard to say what color they were: grey with the hue of twilight under the trees the seemed to be; and yet if they were moved, or set in another light, they were green as shadowed leaves, or brown as fallow fields by night, dusk-silver as water under the stars. ...
     "Are these magic cloaks?" asked Pippin, looking at them with wonder.
     "I do not know what you mean by that," answered the leader of the Elves. "They are fair garments, and the web is good, for it was made in this land. They are elvish robes certainly, if that is what you mean."

But in The Hobbit, magic seems much coarser and less differentiated between the magic-capable. Gandalf's "serious" magic seems to consist largely in loud bangs and flashes:

But not Gandalf. Bilbo's yell had done that much good. It had wakened him up wide in a splintered second, and when goblins came to grab him, there was a terrific flash like lightning in the cave, a smell like gunpowder, and several of them fell down dead."

...Gandalf, listening to their growling and yelping, began to be dreadfully afraid, wizard though he was, and to feel that they were in a very bad place, and had not escaped at all. All the same he was not going to let them have it all their own way, though he could not do very much stuck up a tall tree with wolves all round on the ground below. He gathered the huge pine-cones from the branches of his tree. Then he set one alight with bright blue fire, and threw it whizzing down among the circle of the wolves. ... Then came another and another, one in blue flames, one in red, another in green. They burst on the ground in the middle of the circle and went off in colored sparks and smoke.

But he seems to have engaged in a deal of trivial magic as well:

"Gandalf, Gandalf! Good gracious me! Not the wandering wizard that gave Old Took a pair of magic diamond studs that fastened themselves and never came undone till ordered?

Elvish magic, too, is the stuff of fairy tales à la the brothers Grimm:

"No sooner had the first stepped into the clearing than all the lights went out as if by magic. ...
     ...
     "...he stumbled forward into the full blaze of fire and torches. It was no good. Out went all the lights again and complete darkness fell.
     ...
     "... Loud and clear and fair were those songs, and out stepped Thorin into their midst.
     "Dead silence fell in the middle of a word. Out went all the light. The fires leaped up in black smokes."

"There is no escape from my magic doors for those who are once brought inside."

(Parenthetically, it is not just the construction of different elements of the fantastic, but the tone, that matured between the earlier and later works; the language of the "L. o. t. R." is more formal than that of The Hobbit.)

The quality of the magic seems to reflect the quality of its practitioners, and as the former, so the latter differs between the earlier and later works of Middle-Earth. This is most noteworthy in the Elves, who in the later works seem to be in the world but not of it:

They passed slowly, and the hobbits could see the starlight glimmering on their hair and in their eyes. They bore no lights, yet as they walked a shimmer, like the light of the moon above the rim of the hills before it rises, seemed to fall about their feet. They were now silent.

"The Elves have their own labors and their own sorrows, and they are little concerned with the ways of hobbits, or of any other creatures upon earth. Our paths cross theirs seldom, by chance or purpose."

"Not that hobbits would ever acquire the elvish appetite for music and poetry and tales. They seem to like them as much as food, or more."

"Whether they've made the land, or the land's made them, it's hard to say, if you take my meaning. It's wonderfully quiet here. Nothing seems to be going on, and nobody seems to want it to. If there's any magic about, it's right down deep, where I can't lay my hands on it, in a manner of speaking."

Even the necessaries of Elvish life are wondrous in the later works:

But he remembered that there was bread, surpassing the savor of a fair white loaf to one who is starving; and fruits sweet as wildberries and righer than the tended fruits of gardens; he drained a cup that was filled with a fragrant draught, cool as a clear fountain, golden as a summer afternoon.

And there is lembas, the Elvish waybread, that in the second or third book of the trilogy is described as having the property of becoming increasingly sustaining the longer one relies solely upon it for nourishment. Elvish tables are not laden with ordinary food; and although I cannot tell precisely why, I am convinced that the Elves were vegetarians in the "L. o. t. R." Again, contrast all this with the evidence in The Hobbit:

There were many people there, elvish-looking folk, all dressed in green and brown and sitting on sawn rings of the felled treas in a great circle. There was a fire in their midst and there were torches fastened to some of the trees round about; but most splendid sight of all: they were eating and drinking and laughing merrily.
     The smell of the roast meats was so enchanting...

And consider the barrels of food and drink that the Wood Elves imported from across the land:

Some of them were wine-barrels.... But among them were several others which had been used for bringing other stuffs, butter, apples, and all sorts of things, to the king's palace.

Roasts, butter, and apples: more hobbit-food than Elvish. All of which suggests to me that at the time The Hobbit was written, Tolkien had not yet established the vast gulfs of Being between the different races of Middle-Earth, Elves, Dwarves, and Men. It is complexity unsuitable for a children's book, at the very least.

As long as I'm exegesing Tolkien, here's another small thing. As I've posted before, I find the ostensible religiosity of Tolkien's Middle-Earth "legendarium" convincing as a general proposition, but less so in detail. Out of the blue (or yellow/black, since I was reading in bed at 10 p.m.), a few passages struck me as strongly relevant to the proposition, all from the Council of Elrond in The Fellowship of the Ring:

• "It is perilous to study too deeply the arts of the Enemy, for good or for ill." This called to mind Tolkien's disapproval of C. S. Lewis' dedicating The Screwtape Letters to him, because he disapproved of the book altogether for this very reason.
  
• "...the power of Sauron may be broken, and fear of his dominion be taken away for ever." From the previous passage, Sauron is the Middle-Earth analogue of Satan; I wonder, then, if the casting of the Ring into the volcano is an analogue for the Crucifixion? Not directly, of course; no-one is killed and rises from the dead, at least not as such; however, Frodo's bearing of the Ring is clearly an act of self-sacrifice – "'I will take the Ring,' he said, 'though I do not know the way.' – and, as he said in The Return of the King, he saved the Shire for everyone else, but not for him: he was too wounded by his burden to enjoy it, and then sailed for the Undying Lands, perhaps an analogue of the Ascension.
  
• "The road must be trod, but it will be very hard. And neither strength nor wisdome will carry us very far upon it. This quest may be attempted by the weak with as much hope as the strong." Perhaps a statement of the burden of Christian faith?
  
• "'I will take the Ring,' he said, 'though I do not know the way.'" Again, related to the matter of the burden of faith and surrender of one's self to God, accepting whatever burden God may place upon one but trusting that God will see one through.
  

And that's the way I see it.