Impression of depth in The Lord of the Rings

• 1. A Distant City

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  J. R. R. Tolkien described the impression of depth in The Lord of the Rings with an image from one of his letters. It was like "viewing far off an unvisited island, or seeing the towers of a distant city gleaming in a sunlit mist." The feeling was always of something beyond the frame.

  Tom Shippey, a Tolkien scholar, called this depth "the one literary quality... which most certainly distinguishes Tolkien from his many imitators." He was speaking of fantasy fiction specifically. Behind the visible text, Shippey argued, lay "a coherent, consistent, deeply fascinating world about which he had no time then to speak."

  Tolkien had worked out his thinking about depth not in the context of his own fiction, but in essays about medieval English literature he admired.

• 2. Deep Roots

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  Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a 14th-century English chivalric romance, was one of Tolkien's primary examples of the quality he was trying to create. He praised it for having "deep roots in the past, deeper even than its author was aware." That depth, in his view, allowed it to survive even "the severe test" of being required reading for students.

  Tolkien asked what "this flavour, this atmosphere, this virtue that such rooted works have" accounted for their enduring power. He wanted to understand why old material, pressed into the service of new purposes, retained its force. His answer pointed to works that had absorbed and rehandled older material across centuries.

  In "The Monsters and the Critics," Tolkien described what Beowulf had achieved. It had created the illusion of surveying "a past, pagan but noble and fraught with a deep significance." That past, he continued, "itself had depth and reached backward into a dark antiquity of sorrow." The poem achieved this through what it suggested rather than what it explained.

  The scholar Adrien Bonjour observed that Beowulf's many digressions into other stories rendered "the background of the poem extraordinarily alive." Each digression illuminated the main story through contrast and example, without serving the plot directly.

  Scholars such as Gergely Nagy later identified other texts that had given Tolkien a strong impression of depth. These included Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur and Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde. Tolkien also found the quality in Virgil's Aeneid, Shakespeare's Macbeth, Sir Orfeo, and Grimms' Fairy Tales.

  Tolkien described his own ambition for the legendarium with a single phrase. He wanted "the lesser drawing splendour from the vast backcloths."

• 3. Vast Backcloths

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  Tolkien once described his aim for the legendarium in precise terms. He wanted "a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story." He intended to dedicate it simply "to England; to my country."

  Michael Drout, a Tolkien scholar working with colleagues, noted that the word "vast" was no exaggeration. Behind The Lord of the Rings stood The Silmarillion and the multi-volume legendarium that Christopher Tolkien edited and published. Behind even those lengthy works lay what Drout described as "further drafts, partially edited copies, riders, cancelled pages, and even lost texts."

  Tom Shippey pointed to Tolkien's maps as carrying their share of the effect. They gave, he argued, "an air of solidity and extent" to Middle-earth. The maps provided "repeated implicit assurances of the existence of the things they label, and of course of their nature and history too." A reader who studied the maps before the story started was already being assured that this world had existed long before the narrative began. The smaller gestures scattered through the prose would do the same work, but more quietly.

• 4. The Unspoken Story

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  Eowyn, the lady of Rohan, does not simply give Merry Brandybuck a horn. She gives him an ancient silver horn "from the Hoard of Scatha the Worm." Scatha is never introduced. The mention assumes the reader already knows, and in doing so it conjures the existence of a whole other story.

  Aragorn sings of Beren and Luthien in one of many such references woven through the text. Sam Gamgee mentions the Silmarils. The Elf-lord Elrond describes the Elven-smith Celebrimbor. Each of these references drew on texts that Tolkien had written but not yet published. They gave readers the sense that Middle-earth extended far beyond the pages of any single story.

  The scholar Gergely Nagy examined one of the most revealing examples: Sam's fight with the giant spider Shelob. Shelob has stung Frodo during their attempt to enter Sauron's land of Mordor, and Sam turns on her with his blade. The text notes that the folds of Shelob's belly "could not be pierced by any strength of men." Not even, it continues, "though Elf or Dwarf should forge the steel or the hand of Beren or of Turin wield it."

  Turin Turambar's invocation there becomes, in Nagy's reading, a reflection of Turin slaying Glaurung the dragon. Glaurung served the first Dark Lord, Morgoth. This linked Shelob's evil to that of Ungoliant, the first and greatest of the giant spiders, who destroyed the Two Trees of Valinor. Sam's present feud with the spider mirrors Turin's ancient feud with the dragon. Shelob's attack on Frodo, Sam's master, was what first turned Sam against her. Nagy concludes that "the dimension of the scene is thus greatly increased."

  The scholar Katarzyna Ferdynus described how this accumulation of references worked across the whole text. The Fellowship travels through long-forgotten countries and the ruins of old cities. Ferdynus notes that forests and rivers in those lands "once witnessed important historical events." As night falls and firelight shines brightly, they listen. The stories are "histories and legends of long ago, of Elves and Men and the good and evil deeds of the Elder Days." Those "numerous references," she writes, "create the striking impression of the depth of time." Not all the background material pointed in the same direction. Tolkien had deliberately built contradictions into his world, trusting them to produce the same effect as discrepancies in a real historical record.

• 5. Useful Contradictions

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  The Prologue to The Lord of the Rings introduces the device of multiple accounts before the main narrative begins. The narrator explains that "many of their traditions, up to that time still mainly oral, were collected and written down." It then details the copies, redactions, and translations of the fictive Red Book of Westmarch. The scholar Peri Sipahi notes this approach echoes real medieval practice. The poem Beowulf assumes its audience already knows the historical characters. The Poetic Edda is a compilation of numerous older sources.

  Michael Drout argues that apparent contradictions tend to give readers the sense of a genuine history. A reader may assume that an omniscient author can make a fictional story wholly consistent. When a text contains contradictions instead, the instinct is to read them as traces of different, imperfect sources compiled together.

  Tolkien stated in one passage that Elves rode without saddle or harness. Yet Glorfindel's horse is described as having both bit and bridle. Glorfindel even offers to shorten his horse's stirrups for the Hobbit Frodo.

  Tom Bombadil declared himself "Eldest... here before the river and the trees; Tom remembers the first raindrop and the first acorn." Gandalf's account offered a different answer: the Ent Treebeard was "the oldest living thing that still walks beneath the Sun upon this Middle-earth." Tolkien left both claims standing.

  The Rohirrim offered Sipahi his clearest case study of all four factors working at once. Their language and names were all drawn from Old English. This linked Rohan to the real medieval world, layering historical texture beneath the fictional one. The language a reader could not quite place was doing the same work as a story never quite told.

• 6. Followers and Critics

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  Christine Brooke-Rose, a critic and experimental novelist, attacked Tolkien's "histories and genealogies" as not "in the least necessary to the narrative." The Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey saw this objection as evidence of a blind spot. She had also guessed wrongly that Tolkien would have translated all the runic and untranslated messages in the text. Almost all other authors would have done so, Shippey argued, but Tolkien valued the sound of untranslated language.

  Ursula K. Le Guin took a more engaged view. In her Earthsea novels, she alluded to tales of Elfarran, Morred, and the Firelord. These were references to stories that did not yet exist when she wrote them. She wrote those stories many years later, following the allusions back to their source.

  The scholar Katherine Sas found that J. K. Rowling had applied the technique in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Rowling worked at a smaller scale than Tolkien. Sas argues she applied all four of the factors: background detail, casual incomplete mentions, multiple accounts, and varying styles.

  Tolkien wrote that the impression of depth would be hard to sustain in the older legendarium, "unless new unattainable vistas are again revealed." He added that many of those older legends were "purely mythological, and nearly all are grim and tragic." The stories glimpsed at a distance were, by his own account, darker than anything the Fellowship ever directly faced.