The Barbarians of Middle-earth
Friday, November 13, 2009
posted by Al Harron
There’s an unfortunate preconception about Tolkien and Middle-earth: that it’s a safe, twee, rustic fairyland, where all dangers are far away and not of too much concern to the pipe-smoking gentlemen enjoying their tea in the garden. I myself went through an anti-Tolkien period, which seems to be a rite of passage among certain fantasy readers. Eventually, however, my dismissal of Tolkien, much like my teen awkwardness, is something I’m happy to leave behind in adolescence. For it is only now, after I’ve read more literature, that I can truly appreciate just how good Tolkien was. No longer am I hung up on the perceptions of youth, so preoccupied with a need to feel “adult” and “sophisticated,” which I foolishly deemed Tolkien not to be.
Take the songs and poems, for example. Some might read them and imagine them being sung by an effette lute-strumming minstrel in red leggings. I imagine them being roared and bellowed, as if by Viking skalds and Gaelic bards around a fire, their very voices beating back the cold and dark of night. How else could one imagine “The Road Goes Ever On” as anything other than a rousing folk ballad tinged with wistful melancholy, or “The Fall of Gil-Galad” as a somber dirge, or “The Song of Eärendil” as an inspirational epic? Though the battles are comparatively brief in The Lord of the Rings, they’re as full of genuine blood & thunder as any battle I’ve read. The madness, chaos, brutality and carnage of battle is never shied away from: the Battle of Five Armies staining the very rocks black with goblin blood, the Witch-King purposefully trampling on the skulls of his fallen soldiers as he approaches Minas Tirith, Pippin disemboweling a hill-troll of Gorgoroth in gruesome detail. It’s even more profound in The Silmarillion, a book practically awash with crimson ruin, not to mention the lost tales recorded in The History of Middle-earth.
I often wondered if this was a result of me projecting a Howardian light on Tolkien’s words. As a lad, I often drew illustrations of Tolkien characters in what I imagined to be more “heroic” than the usual willowy, pretty artwork I’d seen on book covers and websites. It was a while after this that I started reading Conan, and sought out Howardian sources on the Net. I was tremendously excited to discover that I was not alone: indeed, there was an entire website dedicated to Howard and Tolkien, together. Tolkien was not exalted above Howard, nor the reverse: both were treated as twin colossi, casting equally long and equally dark shadows across the landscape of modern fantastic literature.
No-one illustrated this to me more succinctly and completely than Steve Tompkins, in his essay “The Shortest Distance Between Two Towers,” which I constantly cite as one of my favorite pieces of Howard–and Tolkien–scholarship. I never got a chance to thank him personally: to make up for that, I will follow his lead, arguing that Tolkien and Howard are not on opposite sides of the gulf of fantasy fiction, but are far closer than their reputations suggest.
Howard’s fantasy has been unfairly accused of anti-intellectualism, fascism, militarism or just plain wish fulfillment. Tolkien’s work is often criticized as being overly sentimental, morally simplistic, archaic, long-winded, a conservative fantasy for Daily Mail readers. All these criticisms are just as glib, misguided and filled with factual errors as one would expect from lack of familiarity with the source material. A closer reading of The Lord of the Rings alone reveals startling depths of horror, violence, savagery and barbarism.
So we come to the barbarians of Middle-earth. There are a number of peoples who could easily be labeled such in The Lord of the Rings, most of whom follow Sauron’s banner, be it by alliance, coersion or conquest: the Haradhrim and Easterling tribes–Wainriders, Variags–warriors born of the deserts and steppes beyond the known lands. The wild men of Dunland who allied themselves with Sauron fit the popular conception of barbarians as a rabble of unwashed, hairy, disorganized savages.
Yet there are also barbarians who did not submit to the forces of darkness. Beorn, the giant woodsman of The Hobbit, was a mighty ally to the free peoples, and his son Grimbeorn lead his kin in the defense of Mirkwood during the War of the Ring. Ghân-buri-Ghân and the mysterious Drûgs assist the Rohirrim on their march to Minas Tirith. The People of the Horse-Lords themselves are quite clearly hewn from the same rock as the Saxons Tolkien loved. Even the Dúnedain, of whom Aragorn was the last chieftain, straddle a peculiar line between barbarism and civilization in a way curiously reminiscent of Howard’s Atlanteans. One can go beyond to the Lost Tales and the barbaric kingdom of Rhudaur, the Balchoth, and the mysterious Lossoth of the Forodwaith. Like the Hyborian Age Gazetteers, “Barbarians of Middle-earth” will be an occasional series, each week focusing on a different culture. Being a Howard website as well as a Tolkien one, comparisons between the two authors will likely emerge, as well as allusions to history and mythology.
As to any worries about me and others viewing Tolkien through blood-tinted spectacles: the man himself provides support for the approach. Far from being an ivory-tower intellectual, watching impassively from a safe bastion, Tolkien personally witnessed more horror and carnage at the Somme than most men could in several lifetimes. Tolkien was a man utterly unafraid to speak his mind, be it on his disgust for the irresponsibility of unchecked industrialization, his rejection of the Second Vatican Council’s reforms, or voicing in no uncertain terms exactly what Rutten & Loening of Potsdam could do with their questions of racial origin. He was irritated by the misrepresentation of his work, and was especially irate at the “effeminate” illustrations of Legolas in one example. That’s not to say Tollers was a grouch: he also had gigantic mirth befitting a man of barbaric heritage. One occasion saw him dressing up as a Germanic warrior, and chasing his terrified neighbors down the street, axe in hand. That famous picture of Howard and Clyde Tevis Smith enacting some primal paleolithic duel springs to mind!
Strangely enough, though Middle-earth is practically crawling with barbarians, Tolkien never uses the term itself throughout the work. The closest he comes is found in the etymology of Gandalf’s sword Glamdring, or “Foe-Hammer”: “glam” originally being Sindarin for “barbarous host,” and used exclusively in regards to orcs. Why didn’t Tolkien use the word? Martin Martinez, author of Visualizing Middle-earth, concludes that the word is incompatible for Tolkien’s world of heroism. While I disagree with his conclusion and a few of his arguments, he notes that Tolkien was especially conscious of the negative connotations such words carry in society. My belief is that Tolkien did not want his barbaric people to be tainted by the baggage the word carries in popular usage. To call someone a barbarian may be grievous insult: insinuating at best merely a lack of sophistication, poor hygiene and meagre grooming, and at worst active hostility to order, peace and security. I’m of the opinion that Tolkien may have felt referring to the Rohirrim as barbarians in the text would result in sensitive readers getting the wrong idea.
Tolkien had prior experience of the English language’s power to depreciate and degrade a word. Tolkien’s early legendarium makes reference to fairies & gnomes, and The Hobbit features goblins aplenty. Unfortunately, fairies, gnomes and goblins have a very particular visage in popular conception, one that conjures childlike, mischievous little beings more at home in a Richard Doyle chapbook than in a Norse saga. Miraculously, Tolkien’s elves have more or less avoided contamination from the massive influence of Disney and the Keebler Company, and the orcs retain much of their original menace despite modern iterations.
In my mind, Tolkien would have seen the problems inherent in such a loaded word as barbarian, and avoided using it within his texts. Howard, perhaps enjoying the anarchic defiance usage of the word would entail, evidently did not. However, it’s clear both authors had great respect for barbaric cultures, fictional and historical: they just showed it in different ways.
The barbarians are battering down the walls encompassing Middle-earth. But on which side of the walls are they?
Other installments of “The Barbarians of Middle-earth”:
