The First Artist

An interesting post by papersky on Sunday inspired a number of reflections I was feeling too ill to type up at the time. One of the things she mentioned in passing is the fact that Tolkien is widely viewed as the ‘first artist’ or originator of fantasy fiction.

Now me, I was a Tolkien kid. I came across The Fellowship of the Ring in the library at the age of eleven; for months I wondered what was going to happen next, while I waited impatiently for the other volumes to be returned. Eventually I discovered our local branch library did not actually have them. My mother found out why I was so gloomy, explained about inter-library loans, then kindly shelled out the money to pay for this. After the library had got the books in, I was lost to the world for days.

When I was thirteen, I won a fiver as second prize in a children's poetry competition, and had no doubt what I wanted: my very own set, quite pricey at 25s. a volume. I still have them; they are rather battered these days. Between then and the time I went to university, I read them over and over again. Middle Earth was a refuge that helped to keep me sane.

And I began to explore Tolkien's sources: Gawain and the Green Knight, of course, which he edited (also translated, though I didn't know that then; I began with the Penguin translation and moved on to Tolkien's edition of the Middle English text); Beowulf in the Penguin Classics translation; Anglo-Saxon poetry (again, a translated selection in the Penguin Classics series); the Middle English poem Sir Orfeo; Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur; whatever I could get hold of on Norse saga and legend. It was Tolkien who first got me interested in English place-name etymologies, once I realised that the made-up names in his books, like ‘Wetwang’ and ‘Mitchel Delving’ and ‘Hornburg’, all meant something and often used English place-name elements. I also found that some of the things that appear at first sight to be pure invention on Tolkien’s part, like the great murderous old willow tree, turn up in English folk-lore.

I soon began to understand that Tolkien, though still a great original, was also a borrower on a massive scale, and that there was immense pleasure to be had, a greater pleasure even than reading his books, from tracking him through European epic, legend, saga, romance and folk-tale. And on the way wandering into all kinds of other areas of ancient and medieval literature: such as the Scots Chaucerians, whom I don’t think Tolkien ever uses directly, though I am sure he read them somewhere along the way.

I didn’t get a chance to read widely in earlier modern fantasy fiction for adults until I went to university. On the whole, the books simply weren’t available to borrow or buy. The main exception was T. H. White’s The Once and Future King, which became widely available in paperback after the success of the musical Camelot. But in any case White was Tolkien’s contemporary, and not a source or influence.

The big influence Tolkien himself acknowledged was, of course, William Morris. As a student I read Morris’s romances, the adult novels of George MacDonald, Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees, some James Branch Cabell (whom I did not much like), some E. R. Eddison (ditto), some Lord Dunsany (good in parts), The Crock of Gold by James Stephens (ditto), all of these and more in the paperback adult fantasy series from Ballantine Books edited by Lin Carter. Every week or so, as I recall it now, I would drop into Heffers Paperback Shop and find there was a new book in the series. I still have some of them, though over the years I have jettisoned a few, replaced others with hardbacks or new paperbacks; never without a small pang of loss, mainly for the oddly compelling cover art by Gervasio Gallardo.

The ‘first artist’ of European fantasy is Homer, especially in the Odyssey, a text that has certainly left a mark on Tolkien’s oeuvre: what else is Eärendil, the mariner who sails on an endless quest for his home, but a version of Odysseus? The Odyssey is the second oldest European text that has survived (the Iliad, of course, being the oldest). Homer is where it all begins.

The ‘first artist’ of modern heroic fantasy in English is William Morris. It was Morris who borrowed a landscape from Mandeville’s Travels and Malory and Huon of Burdeux, a style from Malory and Huon (the echo of which can be heard in Tolkien’s more sonorous passages), characters and situations from romances and sagas and folk-tales and his own deeply socialist imagination, and wove them together into something that was both old and very new.

Among the things that arrive with Tolkien were a) the Gnostic dualism and apocalypticism that has plagued fantasy fiction ever since b) the marginalisation, to the point of near-exclusion, of female characters c) the systematic peopling of his world with non-human as well as human characters. (However, Morris makes a sparing use of some non-human magical characters, such as the Wood-woman in The Water of the Wondrous Isles, and there are fairy characters, and fairy kingdoms, in other Victorian fantasies.)

*

Presently as they rode they had before them one of the greatest of those land-waves, and they climbed it slowly, going afoot and leading their horses; but when they were but a little way from the brow they saw, over a gap thereof, something, as it were huge horns rising up into the air beyond the crest of the ridge. So they marvelled, and drew their swords, and held them still awhile, misdoubting if this were perchance some terrible monster of the waste; but whereas the thing moved not at all, they plucked up heart and fared on.

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William Morris (1834–1896)

from The Well at the World’s End (1896)


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