“Don’t You Let Go!”

On a spring morning, I hurried along the High Street in Oxford, heading for Merton College. One of the oldest colleges, it was tucked behind other buildings, much of it completed in the 13th Century. Other people were also moving in that direction. I followed.

When I was first in Oxford, I was reluctant to enter college quadrangles. Stone walls lined the streets. St. John’s college had a row of broken wine bottles pressed into the top of its wall. I had permission to attend lectures, but I didn’t have a black student gown, without which you might be turned away. Now, having roamed the university for both Michelmas and Hilary terms, I was less shy.

That morning we had heard that J.R.R. Tolkien would make a presentation. It was 1967, and The Lord of the Rings, published in 1955, had made him into a famous figure, though he was retired from his post as Professor of English Language and Literature and Fellow of the college.

In the room where he was to speak, carved wooden wainscoting lined the walls. There was room only to stand. I found a place against the wall, packed in behind a crush of people. I was too short to see the podium. In fact, I never saw Tolkien at all. But I did hear him.

Tolkien read a story about Tom Bombadil. Bombadil had been part of Tolkien’s earliest mythic world, begun as a story for his children about a Dutch wooden doll with a ruddy face, bright blue eyes, and a flowing beard. He wore a battered hat, a blue coat and yellow boots. He appears in The Fellowship of the Ring (the first of three LOTR volumes), as a powerful nature spirit, living in the valley of the Withywindle with his wife Goldberry. Tolkien wrote that he was not important to the LOTR narrative, but represented something Tolkien thought should be included. Afficionados of the books have debated the character of Tom Bombadil ever since.

At the time of the reading, I was aware of none of this. While in Oxford, I had resisted the lectures about early English literature. Tolkien famously lectured on Beowulf, for instance. In my youthful arrogance, I was paying attention to James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, to a lecturer named Francis Warner, who had come from Cambridge. I was unaware of the rift between the universities which pitted Cambridge critics against Oxford scholars and philologists. I now realize my degree in English from Luther College in Iowa hewed more towards the Modernism delineated at Cambridge.

Tolkien and his friends met for years in either C.S. Lewis’ college rooms up the street at Magdalen College or at the Eagle and Child pub, discussing their craft and reading each other their work. Later called the Inklings, they felt that fantasy and fairy tales are “the oldest and most natural” way of telling stories and may be the best. Tolkien himself was bent on making a mythology for England, the ancient Middle-earth. He found the tales of King Arthur too Frenchified!

I resisted reading Tolkien, and all of the other fantasies which slipped from his sleeve, C.S.Lewis, Philip Pullman, J.K. Rowling, George R.R. Martin, for many, many years. In my family, however, were many varieties of fans of these books. One afternoon my brother David anointed “the Nine” of us who went hiking in the untamed woods across the road from our cabin as the “fellowship of the ring.” He must have been Aragorn, Jesse, Frodo. I was probably Merry or Pippin, a hobbit. I was charmed by this, but still did not read the books and had no real sense of how the fellowship was formed, nor what it was trying to do.

To me, 19th Century realistic literature, the writings of Tolstoy, Jane Austen, the Brontes, Flaubert and Alexandre Dumas, were where I looked for truth. Fantasy literature may indeed have taken over in Europe in the 20th Century (Tolkien and Orwell top their lists), but realists still dominated in the U.S., Hemingway, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Cather and Baldwin.

Nevertheless, a couple of years ago, I finally read The Lord of the Rings. I get it. It is a great and wonderful tale set in a pre-Christian, mythic England. It is an heraldic story, but rooted in the real, deeply stirring of human nature. It was only a part of Tolkien’s legendarium, which he worked on for many years. The Shire, home of the hobbits, was not very different from the Oxford where Tolkien got around on a bicycle and smoked his pipe, talking and drinking with friends in a pub near the center of town. Tolkien said his books were written in his “life’s blood.”

I cannot help but be moved by the films made of the books as well. Few liberties were taken with the text and the characters of Gandalf, Aragon, Frodo and the elves are inspired, providing graphic portrayals which cannot be better imagined.

And so, perhaps it isn’t important what genre stories are, so long as they are grounded in the real and in truth. “Don’t you let go,” commands Sam in an awful voice as Frodo hangs over the Cracks of Doom. Gollum has bitten the one ring off Frodo’s hand and fallen into the pit. Mordor is defeated. With a great effort, Frodo heaves himself up and Sam drags him over the ledge. They lie on a rock as the world crashes and burns around them, thinking of the Shire, their home. “Don’t you let go,” says Sam. It is an instruction to all of us.