Tolkien’s “cultus” is now an integral part of our culture

JRR Tolkien was famously appalled by the eagerness with which American hippies in the 1960s snapped up his tales of hobbits, elves and wizards. It was, he wrote, a “deplorable cultus”, and he commented dismissively that: “Art moves them and they don’t know what they’ve been moved by and they get quite drunk on it. Many young Americans are involved with the story in a way I’m not.”

So what he would have made of the abiding influence of his Lord of the Rings books on 20th century culture – an influence driven more than anything else by the American uptake of his work – is anyone’s guess.

Tolkien’s “cultus” is now an integral part of our culture. Without his particular brand of high or epic fantasy – its feudal Celtic settings, Edwardian cadences and contrasting dramatisations of good and evil – our shelves would be bare of the kind of bulging, bodice-ripping, medieval fantasy that buys yachts for people such as David Eddings, Julian May and CJ Cherryh.

Not a bad thing, perhaps. But writers such as Terry Pratchett, Roger Zelazny and Ursula K Le Guin might also be denied a crucial inspiration. There would be no Dungeons and Dragons (and a vastly thinner version of the geek culture and gaming revolution it inspired) and no World of Warcraft, and its 11.5 million subscribers would have to find something else to do with their lives.

There’d be none of the epically silly and thrilling Lord of the Rings films by Peter Jackson (the 15th, 8th and 2nd highest grossing movies of all time, respectively), and there certainly wouldn’t be, a few times each decade, another bundle of Tolkienana unearthed from the vaults and published by his son Christopher along with the author’s mind-bogglingly exhaustive notes.

The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun is the 15th of these things to emerge from the Tolkien archive – and what a Borgesian library that archive must be, lined with tottering piles of manuscript and bedecked with spidery footnotes.

Unlike the other 14, however, it has no connection with the Middle-Earth of the Rings books. Instead, it’s a pair of long poems, written in an English approximation of Old Norse heroic metre, that attempts to reconcile certain crucial differences between the Icelandic Prose Edda and the 13th-century Volsunga Saga. It’s pretty arcane, but fortunately both Wagnerians and Tolkien fans will be at home with the basic lineaments of the story: chosen hero, dragon, obsessive personal jewellery and lashings of destiny.

Sigurd and Gudrun is tentatively dated to the 1930s, well before its author had begun work on the story that would become The Hobbit. But it’s far from an exercise in dusty philology. Tolkien maintained that “to hit you in the eye was the deliberate intention of the Old Norse poet”, and his interpretation, with its tense, counterpointed lines and its knots of alliteration, aims for much the same effect. This is poetry that stamps and swings, all the better for being read aloud, and the narrative is dipped up to the elbows in passion and bloodshed.

“His shield he shed / With shining sword / smoking redly / slew two-handed”: you can practically see the high fives from the black T-shirted fraternity from here.

But go online to try to get an idea of the Tolkien community’s buzz for this one and you get lost fast. Dip even a toe into the murky waters of fandom and the weird rises to meet you like Gollum coming out of his pond. You get ensnared in the various Tolkien name generators that dot the internet, trying to work out whether Drogo Bullroarer Darnswool of Buckland (hobbit name) fits you better than Curunir of the High Ones of Arda (wizard). Or you become tangled in the hundreds of forums, where enthusiastic participants endlessly debate everything from the detailing on Theoden’s splint mail to the feelings aroused by seeing Elijah Wood in pain (“Here again I see the beautiful and noble man suffering – in anguish, in deep travail. He even has a tied-up scene, though the flogging was not included.”) You finally end up bogged down among translations of the Gospels into Quenya, Tolkien’s invented High Elven tongue. And nary an Old Norse Edda in sight.

But the fan base should really take Sigurd and Gudrun to its heart. It’s a peculiarly attractive package: the thunder of the poetry ought to please legend-fanciers and fantasy junkies alike, while scholarly tastes are catered for by an exceptional critical apparatus covering intricacies and elisions in the text and its sources. And I would lay money that not long from now an executive at New Line Studios will have to listen to a pitch beginning: “It’s got a ring and a dragon and smiting. It’s Tolkien. And they made a film of Beowulf.” Stay tuned.