The Dragon's Egg

The great Adam Gopnik, for the New Yorker, discusses high fantasy for the young adult.

From the piece...

What did Tolkien do to this stale stuff to make it so potent? Another British don, Christopher Ricks, once dismissed Tolkien as “our Ossian,” referring to a third-century Irish bard, supposed to be the author of “Fingal” and other Gaelic epics, and wildly popular in the eighteenth century, whose works were actually written by his supposed “translator,” James Macpherson. Dr. Johnson knew it was a fraud, and when asked if any modern man could possibly have written such poetry replied, “Many men, many women, and many children.” Ricks meant the comparison to Ossian as a putdown—that there is something fraudulent and faddish about Tolkien’s ginned-up medievalism.

But the remark helps bring out Tolkien’s real achievement. When you actually read the Ossian epics, you find that they are shaped entirely to neoclassical tastes. The work is heavily Homeric, remote and noble, full of gloomy gray seas and doomy gray mountains, and ribboned with bardlike epithets. “The Lord of the Rings,” by contrast, begins in lovable local detail, birthday parties and fireworks and family squabbles. Tolkien’s early works—“The Silmarillion” and “The Children of Húrin,” published only after his death—are devoid of Hobbits and humors and pipe-smoking wizards; they really are like Ossian, and as dull as dishwater in consequence. Even if, as Johnson thought, a child could have written Ossian, children were never meant to read it. There’s no bright foreground to the story.

This is surely the most significant of the elements that Tolkien brought to fantasy. It’s true that his fantasies are uniquely “thought through”: every creature has its own origin story, script, or grammar; nothing is gratuitous. But even more compelling was his arranged marriage between the Elder Edda and “The Wind in the Willows”—big Icelandic romance and small-scale, cozy English children’s book. The story told by “The Lord of the Rings” is essentially what would happen if Mole and Ratty got drafted into the Nibelungenlied.