Why Tolkien Will Not Wink

Modern English humour is a buffer against feeling. Tolkien refuses the buffer. David Engels on Beowulf, the Wanderer, and the cost of an age that cannot stop ironising.

It has often been remarked — sometimes with irritation, sometimes with a kind of indulgent admiration — that the works of J.R.R. Tolkien display a striking absence of what is commonly called “humour”, at least in its modern sense (which is probably one of the reasons why the films by Peter Jackson so painstakingly tried to reintegrate at least some humorous elements into the narrative). This judgement, while not entirely unjustified at the level of surface observation, rests upon a misunderstanding both of Tolkien’s literary intention and of the cultural tradition within which his work has to be situated. For what appears to a modern reader as a lack — the relative absence of irony, of burlesque, of self-conscious wit, of that habitual undercutting of sentiment which has become second nature to contemporary prose — is in fact better understood as a form of fidelity to an older mode of imaginative seriousness, rooted in the early English and northern European traditions from which Tolkien consciously drew.

This point may be sharpened if one considers the broader cultural context in which Tolkien wrote. The nineteenth and especially the early twentieth century were marked by profound disruptions: industrialisation, two world wars, the erosion of established social forms, the decline of religion, the acceleration of technological change, the rise of totalitarianism. In such a context, jokes, irony, and burlesque more than ever served as a means of survival, a way of negotiating a reality that resists straightforward affirmation. Hence, to refuse the mechanism of humour as a means of establishing a critical distance between oneself and reality was not merely an aesthetic choice, but the expression of a conviction that there remains something in human experience that can still be approached directly, without the mediation of detachment.

More than most of his contemporaries, Tolkien was profoundly aware of these changes, as is made amply clear when reading his correspondence. On the one hand, he was deeply, even quintessentially “English”: his love of the English language, history, landscape, and customs all bear the imprint of his attachment to tradition and identity. But on the other hand, Tolkien may have had such a keen instinct for the decline of the old world because he always felt as a double stranger in the Edwardian and interwar society — being not only a Catholic in an Anglican and still very anti-Catholic environment, but also born in South Africa, where he lost his father, and from where he discovered England with the eyes of a (relative) newcomer. In this light, Tolkien’s position within English culture appears somewhat paradoxical and may explain why he stood at a certain remove from some of its most characteristic modern developments.

An older world

To approach Tolkien with the expectation that his narratives should display the tonal register of twentieth-century English fiction is therefore already to misread him. His work does not belong, in any meaningful sense, to the same lineage as the ironic novel of manners, nor even to that peculiarly English tradition of lightness and detachment which finds its most refined expression in writers such as Wodehouse. Rather, Tolkien stands in a different relation to English letters — one which leads not forward from the eighteenth century, but backward toward the much earlier stratum of Old English and Norse literature, in which the imaginative world is structured not by irony or satire but by the experience of fate, loss, struggle, and the irruption of the miraculous.

Of course, the reader will probably interject at this point that at least Tolkien’s famous “hobbits” do indeed display some sense of very “modern” humour, but this observation rather confirms the statement made above. As explained by Tolkien himself, writing the novels dealing with the “Third Age” mostly from the standpoint of hobbits served as a narrative device, so that the reader could discover Tolkien’s “legendarium” from the perspective of relative outsiders. And in order to play this role of “go-between” adequately, the hobbits are largely modelled on late Victorian society and thus depicted as the most “modern” people in Middle-earth, culturally speaking: Bilbo’s and Frodo’s voyage from the Shire to the Lonely Mountain and to Gondor is, in many ways, a form of time-travelling from the nineteenth century to the Early Middle Ages, where puns against the Sackville-Bagginses seem profoundly out of place and the only admissible forms of humour appear to be debates about the number of slain orcs or the veteran’s keen interest in the dining rooms of the fortress of Minas Tirith — not to speak of the deeply other-worldly earthiness of the Tom Bombadil idyll.

This contrast may be clarified if one considers, even briefly, the tone of the Old English elegies — The Wanderer, The Seafarer — or the great heroic poem Beowulf, to which Tolkien devoted some of his most important scholarly work. Of course, these texts are not devoid of variation in mood, nor are they wholly without moments of wry observation; but they are, in their essence, serious in a way that is difficult for the modern sensibility to sustain in the long run. For indeed, their governing awareness is that of the transience of all beings: the hall falls silent, the lord is dead, the companions are scattered, and the solitary figure is left to contemplate the ruin of what once was. The famous question “where are the horse and the rider?” is not treated ironically, but as a genuine and irreducible question.

In such a literary world, irony in the modern sense has little purchase. The distance between speaker and utterance, which irony presupposes, is precisely what these texts do not, and even cannot, cultivate. The voice speaks from within the experience it describes; it does not step aside from it in order to comment. To adopt an ironic stance in such a context would be not merely stylistically incongruous, but structurally destructive: it would dissolve the very conditions under which the tragic perception becomes possible. It is thus only at very selected moments in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings that such anachronisms are introduced to the narrative, through the more hobbit-ish episodes which serve to reinforce the reader’s engagement with the main, increasingly high-flying narrative.

Monsters and Critics

As stated above, Tolkien, as a philologist, was not only familiar with this tradition but deeply formed by it. His well-known lecture “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” is often read as a defence of the poem’s artistic integrity; but it is also, more subtly, an articulation of the imaginative horizon within which Tolkien himself operated. The monsters of Beowulf are not to be explained away or reduced to allegorical devices; they belong to a world in which the confrontation with darkness is both literal and metaphysical. To treat them ironically would be to diminish their significance, to reduce the poem to something less than it is. This probably explains why Tolkien’s own forays into a more satirical treatment of the early medieval world — such as Farmer Giles of Ham — have never achieved the resonance of the legendarium proper.

It is in this sense that Tolkien’s own legendarium must be understood. Middle-earth is not constructed as a stage upon which modern psychological types enact their dramas under the sign of self-awareness; it is rather an attempt — however mediated or refracted through later sensibilities — to recover a mode of narrative in which the fundamental categories of experience are not yet subjected to ironic erosion. The reader is instead invited — indeed required — to enter into a world in which actions carry weight, in which words bind, and in which loss is not mitigated by commentary. It is no coincidence that, once shaped by Tolkien, all future “high fantasy” would try to emulate, at least to a certain degree, these characteristics. This is even the case, interestingly, with George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, equally devoid of modern humour, but replacing archaising innocence with modernising hard-boiled cynicism.

It may be objected that English literature, even in its earlier phases, was not wholly devoid of irony, and that by the time of Shakespeare a considerable sophistication in the use of tonal contrast had already been achieved. This is undoubtedly true. Yet the irony of Shakespeare is of a different order from that which has come to dominate modern sensibility. It operates within a framework that still admits of genuine tragedy and does not undermine the seriousness of the tragic vision itself, but serves rather as a healthy counterbalance, on the model of the tension between Greek tragedy and satyr play. Hamlet may speak in riddles, Lear may oscillate between madness and insight, but the plays do not finally retreat into detachment: the suffering remains real, and the audience is not permitted the comfort of a purely ironic stance.

The development of a more pervasive and habitual irony belongs rather to a later period, and is closely connected with the emergence of a self-reflective, often sceptical consciousness characteristic of modernity. By the eighteenth century, particularly in its later phases, one begins to encounter a more pronounced tendency to place a layer of interpretation between the event and its representation, especially with the great satirists such as Sterne, Pope, Thackeray, and Swift. Even the short-lived medievalism of the Victorian period — seen in figures such as Tennyson or William Morris — while often animated by a genuine longing for an earlier world, cannot entirely escape this occasional mediation when it does not indulge in a certain “faerie” atmosphere in which the past is aestheticised rather than reconstructed, becoming, to some extent, an object of contemplation rather than a living horizon.

Ironising the inadmissible

It is here that the question of humour, or its relative absence, becomes more intelligible. Modern humour, particularly in its English forms, is frequently bound up with understatement, with the strategic deflation of seriousness, with a refusal to allow any sentiment to stand unqualified. It is, in many ways, a highly civilised achievement; but it is also a symptom of a culture that has learned to protect itself against its own deeper impulses. The joke intervenes where the feeling might otherwise become too immediate; irony provides a buffer against the full force of experience. From a certain point of view, it is no coincidence that not only the hobbits seem capable of a “modern” sense of the comic, but also the orcs — although their brutal, vulgar, and scheming sort of humour already discloses their “industrial”, rather than Victorian, mindset.

Tolkien’s Middle-earth, with the above-mentioned exceptions, still largely dispenses with this buffer. This does not mean that the legendarium is devoid of lighter moments, nor that it lacks variation in tone. But the governing impulse is not to qualify or to relativise, but to affirm. The moral and emotional structures of the story are presented without the habitual signals that would invite the reader to stand apart from them. In consequence, the reader is placed in a position that may feel, at first, unfamiliar or even uncomfortable: one is asked to take seriously what is presented, without recourse to the protective mechanisms of irony — something the reader either relishes, or finds deeply uncomfortable.

It would be possible, of course, to describe this archaising limitation as a form of escapism, and indeed some have done so, finding themselves deeply annoyed by the legendarium’s lack of modernity — most of all, of course, in the case of The Silmarillion, which Tolkien’s publisher initially declined as commercially unviable. Yet such a description presupposes that irony is the normative mode of serious literature, and that its absence must therefore be accounted for as a deficiency. An alternative interpretation would be that Tolkien’s work reveals, by contrast, the extent to which modern literature has come to rely upon irony as a default posture. What appears as a lack in Tolkien may in fact be a lack in ourselves: a diminished capacity to engage with a mode of narrative that does not continually reassure us of our distance from it.