The Hobbit; The Sword in the Stone;
The Queen of Air and Darkness;
The Ill-Made Knight;
The Candle in the Wind
IF THE BOOKS OF THE 1920S AND EARLY 1930S HAD over them the long shadow of a terrible war past, those that came toward the end of the 1930s slipped into the shadow of a war to come. It’s widely noted that the experience of the Second World War lays its footprint firmly on the Middle-earth of The Lord of the Rings (1954–5), much of whose composition took place during the war years. The Lord of the Rings is tricky to fit into the story of children’s literature, though: it both belongs, and it doesn’t. Though it drew knowingly on a whole range of mythological predecessors, it did more than any other single book to create the magical fantasy genre as it now stands. Wizards, dragons, dwarves, elves, and goblins: every children’s book that contains them owes a debt to Tolkien. At the same time, with its thousand-plus-page heft and its intricately fastidious linguistic and political and mythological world-building, it is more likely to be found on the student than on the nursery bookshelf.
But that book’s predecessor, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again (1937), is squarely a children’s book – both simpler in language, lighter in theme and brisker in tone than what was to come.* It’s also a book that insistently looks backward. If the general movement of children’s writing through the previous decades had been, at least on the surface of things, away from fairytales, Tolkien very knowingly set out to write a story that went back to those roots. It was a mythological quest narrative, with magical helpers and medieval military politics, monsters, and mazes and dark, dark woods.
C.S. Lewis’s stepson Douglas Gresham, talking about the Narnia stories, described the exchange between Lewis and his great friend Tolkien:
They seem to have talked about the children’s literature of the late 1940s and early 1950s with dismay, finding nothing that they would have enjoyed as children or even could enjoy as adults. The literature that children were being expected to read and enjoy at that time seemed to teach them things that sensible parents would rather their children did not learn – all about ‘issues’ and ‘complexes’ and such. High Adventure, Chivalry, Personal Responsibility, Personal Commitment, Duty, Honor, Courtesy, and Honesty all seemed to have been dismissed as out of date or passé. Jack and Tolkien both agreed that such qualities and virtues were essential to human civilization and decided that they themselves had better have a try at writing about them. So they did.†
Lewis had his try, as Gresham indicates, in the early 1950s, but for Tolkien the project began much earlier.
His starting point was the sentence that begins the book: “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” Hobbits were an original contribution to fantasy literature’s mythological bestiary* and described as follows:
They are inclined to be fat in the stomach; they dress in bright colours (chiefly green and yellow); wear no shoes, because their feet grow natural leathery soles and thick warm brown hair like the stuff on their heads (which is curly); have long clever brown fingers, good-natured faces, and laugh deep fruity laughs (especially after dinner, which they have twice a day when they can get it).
In the story Tolkien tells, he gives his bestiary loving attention, filling it with wargs and spiders, dwarves and elves, talking eagles, shapeshifters, and trolls. Goblins, for instance, nasty grabby little creatures, are evoked with a run of epistrophe – “there were all the baggages and packages lying broken open, and being rummaged by goblins, and smelt by goblins, and fingered by goblins, and quarreled over by goblins.” When they’re annoyed, Tolkien relishes a Dr. Seuss burst of sound-effects: “The yells and yammering, croaking, jibbering and jabbering; howls, growls and curses; shrieking and skriking, that followed were beyond description.” The narrative voice of The Hobbit, throughout, is tuned to be read aloud, full of such sound-effects and rhetorical patternings and peppered with conversational turns (“Now, you know enough to go on with. As I was saying…”) or exclamations: “Gandalf! If you had heard only a quarter of what I have heard about him…”
Tolkien here, as seldom in The Lord of the Rings, doesn’t mind being funny. Gandalf is described as having “long bushy eyebrows that stuck out further than the brim of his shady hat,” and the description of Bilbo’s fright when Thorin blithely mentions that he expects some or all of the party “may never return” is pure Looney Tunes: “At may never return he began to feel a shriek coming up inside, and very soon it burst out like the whistle of an engine coming out of a tunnel.”
There are certain unexpected parallels, when you strip away their very different set-dressings, between The Hobbit and The Wind in the Willows (the Shire is another avatar of the Riverbank; while Mirkwood and the Wild Wood share an atmosphere of unknown perils) – above all, in their most characteristic tension. which is that between wanderlust and the call of the hearth. Bilbo Baggins is a hobbit divided, and the divide is in his very blood. As a Baggins, Bilbo is a pillar of the caricaturally conservative community of the Shire: “people considered them very respectable, not only because most of them were rich, but also because they never had any adventures or did anything unexpected.” But, since The Hobbit is the story of how he “had an adventure” and “lost the neighbors’ respect,” there’s a tearaway side to him too, which descends through his mother “the famous Belladonna Took.” She hails from a branch of the tribe considered “not entirely hobbitlike”: “once in a while members of the Took-clan would go and have adventures. They discreetly disappeared, and the family hushed it up.”
Much of the comedy of the early part of the book (it’s quite some time before Bilbo embarks on his adventure) is in how the boisterous crowd of Dwarves disturb the bourgeois proprieties of his home. “Chip the glasses and crack the plates! Blunt the knives and bend the forks! That’s what Bilbo Baggins hates – Smash the bottles and burn the corks!” they sing cheerily as they do the washing-up. Bilbo tries to be polite, but he is, in modern idiom, more than a bit triggered. There’s an echo here, to my mind, of Beatrix Potter’s home-invasion fantasy The Tale of Mrs Tittlemouse.
Yet as the story goes on, Took and Baggins wrestle for control of Bilbo’s soul. He is, after all, expressly recruited to the adventuring party as a “burglar” – anathema to law-abiding hobbit orthodoxy (and, we can notice, echo of the pretend-criminal games of pirates and bandits that are such a staple of the playground). When he later hears the dwarves singing, in this case about quests and treasure and their ancient homes rather than about washing-up,
something Tookish woke up inside him, and he wished to go and see the great mountains, and hear the pine-trees and the waterfalls, and explore the caves, and wear a sword instead of a walking-stick.
As he approaches the end of his quest, “I am afraid [Bilbo] was not thinking much of the job, but of what lay beyond the blue distance, the quiet Western Land and the Hill and his hobbit-hole under it.” With the hurly-burly done and the battle lost and won, “The Tookish part was getting very tired, and the Baggins was daily getting stronger. ‘I wish now only to be in my own armchair!’ he said.”
Doesn’t that tension speak to one of the profoundest contradictions in childhood itself? Children want to grow up, and they want to remain children for ever. It’s the paradox encapsulated in the fractal narrative of J.M. Barrie’s “tragic boy.” Children yearn to have independent agency in the world, to be brave and consequential and grown-up, to see excitements and novelties, and their literature offers them fantasies of doing so; but at the same time they are deeply conservative. They long for the familiar, the safe, the comprehensible: to return home triumphant and to find, like Max in Where the Wild Things Are, that “his supper was waiting for him, and it was still hot.”
That journey, and the twin impulses that send its hero on it, is the matter of The Hobbit. Bilbo, like every mythological quest hero, travels out into the big world, undergoes trials and tests, meets helpers, acquires magical objects (the dagger Sting and the Ring), discovers qualities in himself that the instigator of his quest saw but he did not, and returns to the safety of home transformed. The journey he makes consists of a string of set-piece encounters and is full of folkloric motifs.
The party’s very first encounter is with three trolls in a wood. With the dwarves captured, the trolls fall to arguing “whether they should roast them slowly, or mince them fine and boil them, or just sit on them one by one and squash them into jelly.” Bilbo plays a Rumpelstiltskin-like riddle-game with Gollum for the ring. There are magical prohibitions. In Mirkwood, like so many places of magical peril, our heroes are warned not to leave the path; and when staying with the were-bear Beorn, they are told, “you must not stray outside until the sun is up, at your peril.” visions of three magical feasts, each bigger than the last, are what lure the travelers into danger. There’s a black river of forgetting, which places one of the dwarves into a magical coma like a lotus-eater. Smaug, with a gap in his jewel-armored belly under “the hollow of the left breast,” has an Achilles armpit.
Tolkien’s evocation of the creatures and their environments is first rate – from the dank underground labyrinth of the goblins where he first encounters Gollum, via the hallucinatory menace of Mirkwood with its predatory spiders, to the echoing halls of the abandoned Dwarvish stronghold under the Lonely Mountain. The dreamlike quality of the progress through Mirkwood (in a story full of dreams and dreamlike states) is especially effective. When Bilbo stabs a giant spider: “Then it went mad and leaped and danced and flung out its legs in horrible jerks, until he killed it with another stroke; and then he fell down and remembered nothing more for a long while.”
As the story progresses, the convivial narrative register of the opening sections starts to take on graver accents. “There was little grass, and before long there was neither bush nor tree, and only broken and blackened stumps to speak of ones long vanished. They were come to the Desolation of the Dragon, and they were come at the waning of the year.” Tolkien is dipping, here, into the ornate registers of the Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon sagas that he draws on: “A whirring noise was heard. A red light touched the points of standing rocks. The dragon came.”; “The others remained with Dain, for Dain dealt his treasure well.”
Smaug and his pile of ancient treasure is a straight lift from Beowulf – and the third part of Beowulf, at that; the autumnal phase of the story when Beowulf is an old man and his heroic vigor is in eclipse. The Hobbit has a very Anglo-Saxon worldview – one in which the heroic age is already passing into legend and modernday man (or hobbit) is left to walk in awe around its ruins. Gandalf explains that he discounted a full-frontal attack on the dragon:
‘That would be no good,’ said the wizard, ‘not without a mighty Warrior, even a Hero. I tried to find one; but warriors are busy fighting one another in distant lands, and in this neighbourhood heroes are scarce, or simply not to be found. Swords in these parts are mostly blunt, and axes are used for trees, and shields as cradles or dish-covers; and dragons are comfortably far-off (and therefore legendary)…
The epic register in The Hobbit, though present, is kept in balance with its hobbit-scale humor. Gandalf is as much twinkly surrogate grandparent as he is powerful arch-mage. Even Thorin’s deathbed speech – in contrast to the grave sonorities of the Grey Havens chapter in The Lord of the Rings – is touchingly brisk and matter-of-fact.
‘There is more in you of good than you know, child of the kindly West. Some courage and some wisdom, blended in measure. If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world. But sad or merry, I must leave it now. Farewell!’ Then Bilbo turned away, and he went by himself, and sat alone wrapped in a blanket, and, whether you believe it or not, he wept until his eyes were red and his voice was hoarse. He was a kindly little soul.
That kindly little soul is returned, at last, to his hole in the ground with a reminder from Gandalf that he is marked out by no special providence. You could say that it’s the acceptance of his non-heroism – the realization that even if he’s brave and good, he’s not the center of the story – that makes Bilbo an adult:
‘You don’t really suppose, do you, that all your adventures and escapes were managed by mere luck, just for your sole benefit? You are a very fine person, Mr. Baggins, and I am very fond of you; but you are only quite a little fellow in a wide world after all!’
‘Thank goodness!’ said Bilbo laughing, and handed him the tobacco-jar.
The very next year, 1938, saw another landmark in fantasy writing with the direct reworking of another ancient myth – one which gave it a pointedly contemporary resonance. T.H. White’s The Sword in the Stone (1938) was the first in a four-book reimagining of Malory’s medieval Morte d’Arthur, published in collected form in 1958 as The Once and Future King.* It’s a quite dazzling tetralogy, and it does what myth does so well – adapts in the retelling to the times in which it’s told. Its influence on subsequent fantasy writing has been huge. Ursula K. Le Guin said in a jacket blurb for a later edition: “I have laughed at White’s great Arthurian novel and cried over it and loved it all my life.”
It’s a rich and eccentric piece of work: worldly, witty, wise, joyous, mournful, serious, and flippant. It’s a fairytale penetrated by intense psychological realism – indeed, by psychoanalytic insight. The first book, The Sword in the Stone (1938), narrates the story of Wart, an orphaned boy brought up at the Castle Sauvage in the affectionate care of Sir Ector and under the tuition of the magician Merlyn. Wart is destined to be squire to his adoptive brother Kay when the latter is a knight – but, of course, he is in fact the son of King Uther Pendragon and his destiny is to become King Arthur.* The book closes with his honoring the prophecy by drawing the titular sword from the stone, demonstrating his rightful claim to the throne.
White locates his Arthurian legends not in the Dark Ages but in a medieval version of England he calls “Gramarye,” in which Uther Pendragon led the Norman Conquest.† In a through-the-lookingglass piece of whimsy, the historical English kings are frequently referred to: in this universe they are mythological figures. The chronological setting is fudged a bit. An arch but moving metafictional touch at the end of the fourth book has the elderly King Arthur talk to a young pageboy called Tom, from Newbold Revel in Warwickshire. He charges him with keeping the candleflame of his story alive. Tom is of course, by implication, Thomas Malory.‡
On the face of it, The Once and Future King doesn’t look much like a children’s book at all. It contains incest, rape, adultery, matricide, depression, mass murder, extremes of cruelty and violence, a handful of smutty jokes and a good deal of political and moral theory, and it’s preoccupied for most of its course with the compromises and regrets of age. Its author himself wrote to a friend in 1938 (of the first book): “It seems impossible to determine whether it is for grown-ups or children. It is more or less a kind of wishfulfillment of things I should like to have happened to me when I was a boy.”*
That’s shrewd. Terence Hanbury White (1906–1964) is both Wart and, in an idealized fantasy form of the schoolmaster he was when he wrote the book, Merlyn. Wart may be fatherless and motherless, but he has the sort of sublimely happy childhood that Tim White (he was christened Terence but his undergraduate nickname, after a chain of chemists called Timothy White, stuck) emphatically did not. We glimpse him and his adoptive brother Kay, at one point, chasing autumn leaves: “For the mere sport of catching them, of shouting and laughing and feeling giddy as they looked up, and of darting about to trap the creatures, which were certainly alive in the cunning with which they slipped away, the two boys were prancing about like young fauns in the ruin of the year.”
Wart is loved. After he spends a night lost in the forest in the first book, trying to catch a goshawk that Kay has allowed to escape its rein, “Sir Ector came bustling out with his greaves on back to front, and kissed the Wart on both cheeks. ‘Well, well, well,’ he exclaimed moistly. ‘Here we are again, hey? What the devil have we been doin,’ hey? Settin’ the whole household upside down.” But inside himself he was proud of the Wart for staying out after a hawk, and prouder still to see that he had got it.” At the end of that book, when the sword has been pulled from the stone and Wart’s grand destiny becomes clear, there’s a piercing moment when he sees Sir Ector.
He saw that his dear guardian was looking quite old and powerless, and that he was kneeling down with difficulty on a gouty knee.
‘Sir,’ said Sir Ector, without looking up, although he was speaking to his own boy.
‘Please do not do this, father,’ said the Wart, kneeling down also. ‘Let me help you up, Sir Ector, because you are making me unhappy.’
Tim White had no Sir Ector. His father was an alcoholic and his mother was selfish, capricious, and glacially unfeeling toward the little boy. So White is Lancelot, too, a character when introducing whom he writes: “It is fatally easy to make young children believe they are horrible.” The marriage broke up, acrimoniously, in White’s adolescence: “My parents loathed each other and were separated; divorced, when I was about fourteen or so,” he said flatly in a lecture in later life. “This meant that my home and education collapsed around my ears, and ever since I have been arming myself against disaster.”*
That unloving mother appears barely transformed in the books as the Orcadian witch-queen Morgause, the mother of Wart/ Arthur’s nemesis, his illegitimate son Mordred. Morgause doesn’t get much screen-time, but she is a memorable monster. She does not love her boys, except capriciously – and they are twisted by their yearning for her approval. In one set-piece they kill a unicorn and profane its beauty in the vain hope of pleasing her: “[Gawaine] hated it for being dead, for having been beautiful, for making him feel a beast. He had loved it and helped to trap it, so now there was nothing to be done except to vent his shame and hatred of himself upon the corpse.”
White wrote of his mother in a diary entry after her death: “Either there were the dreadful parental quarrels and spankings of me when I was tiny or there were excessive scenes of affection during which she wooed me to love her – not her to love me. It was my love that she extracted, not hers that she gave.”* In The Candle in the Wind, White talks about Mordred’s evil:
It is the mother’s not the lover’s lust that rots the mind. It is that which condemns the tragic character to his walking death. It is Jocasta, not Juliet, who dwells in the inner chamber. It is Gertrude, not the silly Ophelia, who sends Hamlet to his madness.
White in adult life was a contradictory, fugitive, hard-to-know man. He tried on identities. His very sympathetic biographer Sylvia Townsend Warner wrote that “every single person who talked to me about White had known a different White. I had a thousand incompatible Whites to put together.”† The abrupt swerves and shifts in his great work reflected the abrupt swerves and shifts in its author. He thirsted for practical knowledge – falconry, aviation, carpentry, painting, medieval Latin shorthand – and he wrote (in The Sword in the Stone): “‘The best thing for being sad,’ replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, ‘is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails.’”
White poured love into the natural world – especially his dog, Brownie. Under “Recreations” in his Who’s Who entry he wrote simply: “Animals.” He struggled with drink, with his acknowledged but not acted-upon homosexuality,‡ and with deep sadomasochistic impulses that he attributed to being beaten at school. (There’s a flick of this in the villainous Sir Turquine, who “has sixty-four knights in prison, whom he has captured in single combat, and he spends the time beating them with thorns. If he captures you, he will beat you too, all naked.” Lancelot responds: “He sounds an exciting man to fight.”)
Townsend Warner concluded that he was driven by fear:
Fear of being afraid, of being a failure, of being trapped. He was afraid of death, afraid of the dark. He was afraid of his own proclivities which might be called vices: drink, boys, a latent sadism. Notably free from fearing God, he was basically afraid of the human race. His life was a running battle with these fears, which he fought with courage, levity, sardonic wit, and industry.*
Fear is there in the books, too. But it sneaks up slowly. The Sword in the Stone, the first one, is overwhelmingly a comic novel. The material it deals with doesn’t come from Malory, and White has fantastic fun sending up chivalric convention. It contains some remarkable tonal switchbacks. White’s easy lyricism is on show when, lost in the Forest Sauvage, Wart comes upon a knight errant:
There was a clearing in the forest, a wide sward of moonlit grass, and the white rays shone full upon the tree trunks on the opposite side. These trees were beeches, whose trunks are always more beautiful in a pearly light, and among the beeches there was the smallest movement and a silvery clink. Before the clink there were just the beeches, but immediately afterward there was a knight in full armour, standing still and silent and unearthly, among the majestic trunks. […] All was moonlit, all silver, too beautiful to describe.
But then when he addresses Sir Pellinore (for it is he), that is mercilessly undercut:
The ghost lifted up its visor, revealing two enormous eyes frosted like ice; exclaimed in an anxious voice, ‘What, what?’; took off its eyes – which turned out to be horn-rimmed spectacles, fogged by being inside the helmet; tried to wipe them on the horse’s mane – which only made them worse; lifted both hands above its head and tried to wipe them on its plume; dropped its lance; dropped the spectacles; got off the horse to search for them – the visor shutting in the process; lifted its visor; bent down for the spectacles; stood up again as the visor shut once more, and exclaimed in a plaintive voice, ‘Oh, dear!’
Sir Pellinore is an absurd figure, in permanent unsuccessful search for the “Beast Glatisant” (a chimerical monster from Malory with a leopard’s body, snake’s head, lion’s legs, stag’s feet, and a tummy that rumbles like the yapping of hounds in pursuit), as is his family’s destiny, but dreaming of a nice night in a feather bed. When Sir Pellinore duels with another knight, in a roistering comic set-piece, the tone is Tweedledum and Tweedledee by way of Monty Python.
Wart’s adventures in the first book – his education largely consists of Merlyn changing him temporarily into an animal – are broadly comic but the alterity of an animal view of the world is breathtakingly well imagined. Here he is as an owl on the wing:
It was curious, but he was not taking life seriously. He felt the castle walls streaking past him, and the ground and the moat swimming up. He kicked with his wings, and the ground sank again, like water in a leaking well. In a second that kick of his wings had lost its effect, and the ground was welling up. He kicked again. It was strange, going forward with the earth ebbing and flowing beneath him, in the utter silence of his down-fringed feathers.
Extraordinary that such passages can coexist with the knockabout comedy of Sir Pellinore (and, indeed, that Sir Pellinore can become a figure of such pathos in the later books). Those tonal variations, often paragraph by paragraph, are present throughout the tetralogy. In the second book* two knights try to cheer up the lovesick Sir Pellinore by disguising themselves as the Beast Glatisant, pantomime-horse-style, only for the real beast to show up and take an amorous fancy to them in the dark: “Somethin’ keeps bumpin’ me behind.”
But the register describes a wider, slower arc toward seriousness. My sense is that White, having started the books as a mocking jeu d’esprit of urbane cynicism, got caught up in the stately tragedy of his source material. We follow the rise and collapse of Arthur’s court and of his ideals, and trace the exquisitely tortured triangular relationship between Arthur, Lancelot and Guenever.
The final book, The Candle in the Wind, sees the Round Table in ruins, and Arthur set against his best friend and his beloved wife not by personal enmity but by the laws that he takes kingship too seriously to ignore.
Arthur is, in that resonant phrase, the once and future king; and his childhood tutor Merlyn is a time-traveler of sorts. “I unfortunately was born at the wrong end of Time,” he tells his protégé on their first meeting, “and I have to live backward from in front, while surrounded by a lot of people living forward from behind. Some people call it having second sight.” The books, too, have a very strange relationship with time. Merlyn frequently refers to nineteenth- and twentieth-century figures. His collection of junk includes “a complete set of cigarette cards depicting wild fowl by Peter Scott,” and at one point he accidentally wizards a top hat out of thin air before crossly returning it. The book’s similes gleefully jump through time. Lancelot is “a sort of Bradman, top of the batting averages”; two jousting knights clang together “like a motor omnibus in collision with a smithy”; ducks fly through the air “looking like champagne bottles balanced on a nimbus of wings.”
The books’ implied audience, the contract between speaker and hearer, is absolutely fixed in the early twentieth century. That isn’t just an engine of their humor. That they were published in the run-up to and during the first years of the Second World War inflects them deeply. The large political preoccupation of Arthur’s kingship is how you deal with the human impulse to violence. In the early years of his reign, Arthur discards the established rules to wage “total war” – “Arthur began with an atrocity and continued with other atrocities” – in order to establish peace. This strategy’s resonance, with the Great War still in recent memory, will not have escaped White’s early readers. But Arthur comes to think “the whole thing was a mistake […] It was a mistake because the Table itself was founded on force. Right must be established by right: it can’t be established by Force Majeure.”
It’s Arthur’s heroic attempt to codify an abstract system of justice, and the way that conflicts with his human loyalties, which shapes his personal tragedy. “The King likes Lancelot so much that he is forced to be unfair to him – for fear of being unfair to other people.” As he’s to discover, the letter killeth while the spirit giveth life. The book’s political and human themes dovetail quite marvelously.
Merlyn’s second sight means the story’s relevance to the European situation at the time of its writing doesn’t even have to rest on the level of allegory. Merlyn at one point refers darkly to “an Austrian who invented a new way of life and convinced himself that he was the chap to make it work. He tried to impose his reformation by the sword, and plunged the civilized world into misery and chaos.” When Arthur’s bitter bastard son Mordred rises to power leading a “popular party” in the final book he does so as a Nazi in all but name, his black-uniformed followers calling themselves Thrashers and bearing the emblem of “a scarlet fist clenching a whip.”
As Arthur heads toward his final encounter with Mordred –the novel leaves him on the eve of that encounter – he is beset by doubts. The whole edifice of his project is built on the idea that man is innately good. What if he isn’t? A passage that comes to resonate through the whole novel is one from the first book, in which Wart (as he then is) spends time transformed into an ant and witnesses the ants going to war against a neighboring colony:
Later in the afternoon a scouting ant wandered across the rush bridge which Merlyn had commanded him to make. It was an ant of exactly the same species, but it came from the other nest. It was met by one of the scavenging ants and murdered.
The broadcasts changed after this news had been reported – or rather, they changed as soon as it had been discovered by spies that the other nest had a good store of seeds.
Mammy – mammy – mammy gave place to Antland, Antland Over All, and the stream of orders were discontinued in favour of lectures about war, patriotism or the economic situation. The fruity voice said that their beloved country was being encircled by a horde of filthy Other-nesters – at which the wireless chorus sang:
When other blood spurts from the knife,
Then everything is fine.
White himself, when war came, sat it out in Ireland writing his book. A diary entry from September 1939 opened: “I suspect that this war may be the end of such civilization as I am accustomed to. I don’t mind much.”
* The Hobbit has a slightly complicated publication history. Rather than The Lord of the Rings being a sequel to The Hobbit, the first book was revised in later editions to become a prequel to The Lord of the Rings. Originally, the invisibility ring Bilbo filches from Gollum is just one more magical MacGuffin, and the story’s most important treasure is the Arkenstone, the dwarven gem the adventurers retrieve from the dragon’s hoard. Only in 1938, while embarking on what was to become The Fellowship of the Ring, did Tolkien realize what a big deal the One Ring needed to be in his novel-sequence. He went on to retcon Bilbo’s encounter with Gollum to reflect its corrupting power: “Thief! Thief, Thief, Baggins! We hates it, we hates it, we hates it forever!”
† In “A Conversation with Douglas Gresham,” in C.S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia (HarperCollins, 1998).
* The creators of the fantasy role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, who ripped off all manner of Tolkieniana, including Ents and Balrogs, included hobbits in their universe as “halflings” for legal reasons, but they are clearly hobbits.
* A fifth book, The Book of Merlyn, written in 1941 but posthumously published in 1977, is often appended to the series.
* Freud described the archetypal “family romance,” in which a child fantasizes that he or she will turn out to be born to different, higher-status parents. Here, in outline, is a plot that runs through countless children’s stories.
† This is maybe a nod to the metafictional gleam of the novels: “gramarye” is a medieval word meaning book-learning.
‡ In fact, Malory’s identity remains obscure. The Newbold Revel man is only one of several candidates. In any case, this would place the action of White’s story
in the early fifteenth century; but elsewhere the narrator airily places the story “in the twelfth century, or whenever it was,” and at least on the face of it we’re just a generation on from the Norman Conquest. So, as I say, a fudge. White was quite knowing about this, noting in a letter to a friend that Malory dressed the past in the armour of his own age and that “We [i.e. White and Malory] care very little for exact dates.”
* Letter to L.J. Potts, 14 January 1938, quoted in Sylvia Townsend Warner, T.H. White: A Biography, [p].
* “The Pleasure of Learning,” lecture delivered in Troy, New York, 1963, quoted in Townsend Warner, T.H. White: A Biography.
* Diary entry quoted in Townsend Warner, T.H. White: A Biography.
† Ibid.
‡ I should be less categorical. White considered himself homosexual and thought that doomed him to unhappiness. He tried and failed to court women, and in later life he was unrequitedly and secretly tormented by love for a boy his diaries called Zed. His agent and friend David Higham, though, thought Townsend Warner painted him as a tormented closet-case to fit her own agenda, going so far as to claim he had put her in touch with a female lover of White’s whose evidence she ignored. Let’s just leave it with the traditional “he never married.”
* Prologue to The Book of Merlyn (University of Texas Press, 1977).
* Originally The Witch in The Wood (1939), but substantially revised and retitled as The Queen of Air and Darkness in the 1958 collected edition.