{Quest Romances}[26th March 1987]

[Redbook3:35-36][19870326:1543p]{Quest Romances}[26^th March 1987]

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[continued]

(LITERARY COMPARISONS)

Philip Howard's comments in The Times recently regarding [J.R.R.] Tolkein's works seem in general quite to the point (unusual for P. Howard) although perhaps a little unfair in emphasis: he give the impression of someone trying to grow out of Tolkein (as I have tried).

But The Lord of the Rings is a romance of a Quest – in a long line, quite deliberately I suspect. The underlying religion -- which is present in all Quest Romances, at least in theory – is very strong; the original clarity of religious vision may have been muddied by being overlaid with too much imaginative mythological interest. The result is convincing in terms of external realities (the material world picture) but not always in terms of internal realities, although often intensely moving (I am thinking of the background histories at this point, as much as of the Lord of the Rings).

But The Lord of the Rings is unique, as far as I know, among Quest Romances (of which I am not sure that the Niblunglied is one) in this respect: in others the Quest is to find something (Treasure, Princess, Grail); in The Lord of the Rings, the Ring having been found by accident, the Quest is deliberately to lose it. This may be seen as a Tolkeinian quirk, or as a (probably unconscious) development of immense sophistication in religious terms. Or do the knights, giants and dragons of other quests, which have to be killed, fulfil the same function? If so, they are not given nearly the same emphasis, and The Lord of the Rings may be said to speak more appropriately to our own times and pre-occupations.

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