J.R.R. TOLKIEN, circa 1981, Author of The Hobbit, and The Lord Of The Rings.
I have never read a book as difficult as J.R.R. Tolkien's The Story of Kullervo. Well, maybe it makes more sense to say that I've never had as much difficulty reading a book as I had reading J.R.R. Tolkien's The Story of Kullervo. Imagine a character in Ulysses pausing to recite verbatim all the cetological minutiae and history of whaling stuff in Moby-Dick, then nestle that in an extended monologue from William Gaddis's JR, and you're still nowhere close to imagining the exhausting, mind-numbing tedium of reading this, one of the Hobbit author's first forays into prose writing.
Now, lest I be accused of not being squarely in the target audience: I used to adore Tolkien. I wrote a book report on The Lord of the Rings in Grade 7, and yet another one in Grade 11. For one middle-school birthday, I eagerly unwrapped a copy of The Silmarillion. (That same birthday I also received a paperback copy of Stephen Hawking's Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays; just a snapshot of the hopeless loser whose byline photo now glowers back at you unfeelingly, dear reader.) I dutifully slogged through all 12 volumes of The History of Middle-earth, in which you learn that in early drafts the stealthy assassin and reluctant king of men, Aragorn, was a hobbit named "Trotter" who wore wooden clogs.
I went to midnight screenings of all the Lord of the Rings films. I had the special edition DVDs. And leather-bound editions of both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and a pewter chalice depicting the mythology of Middle-earth. A Lord of the Rings poster still hangs in the guest room of my parents' house like a thumb-tacked ghost at the feast.
There's a richness in Tolkien's Middle-earth stories that still resonates somewhere inside me. For all their arch goofiness, there's a nostalgic niceness to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. It's a nostalgia tied as much to my adolescent experiences swept up in the high-fantasy adventure storytelling as it is to the types of stories Tolkien was telling.
Though he famously claimed to abhor allegory, it's almost impossible to read The Lord of the Rings without thinking of the British experience during the World Wars. There's a clarity of concept and conflict. Everything exists as a duality: the Two Towers, elves and orcs, good and evil. And it's nice – even somewhat bittersweet – to think of a world where things existed (or were believed to have existed) in such stark, understandable contrasts; where things, for lack of a better phrase, made sense. This may seem like the basic understanding of someone who wrote two book reports on the subject well more than a decade ago, but Tolkien's best stuff always read like an attempt to mythologize Britain in the early 20th century.
As editor Verlyn Flieger (an impossibly Tolkienesque name, to be sure) puts it in this volume's introduction, The Story of Kullervo is Tolkien's "earliest prose venture into myth-making." Written sometime between 1912 and 1914, it's loosely based on The Kalevala, a 19th-century work of epic poetry chronicling Finnish mythology, which Tolkien came across in 1907. Flieger says that Tolkien even tried to teach himself Finnish in order to read The Kalevala in its original language.
The Story of Kullervo plucks its title character from the Finnish myth Tolkien so admired, casting "Kullervo the hapless" as a tragic hero with a magic dog seeking vengeance on an evil magician. (Kullervo was also the inspiration for Túrin Turambar, the protagonist of another posthumous Tolkien story, The Children of Húrin.) There are scenes of singing in the woods and suppers of cake and bacon. The prose is stuffy in that way that lots of fantasy and myth writing is stuffy. Like, for example, Tolkien will write that Kullervo "marched for two days and third day" instead of just saying, "he marched for three days." If there's some sort of rhythm to this, I'm totally deaf to it. The story is punctuated by long stretches of poetry, as well as parenthetical editorial notes, and unless you're an accredited professor of Tolkien Studies, I can't imagine why you'd have any use for it whatsoever.
Thing is: Tolkien invites this kind of literary obsessiveness. Every note, every half-formed thought or undercooked idea or character name scrawled on a cocktail napkin is of interest to a circle of academics, fans and hardcore Middle-earth devotees. His body of posthumous fiction almost outstrips the stuff he published while alive (in volume, not quality). He's basically the Tupac of fantasy literature. (All this "discovered" work is also a handy mini-industry for people such as Flieger and Christopher Tolkien, the author's son and editor.)
If there's a takeaway from Kullervo for those of us who don't share this intense passion for anything that can be reasonably attributed to Tolkien, it may be just how much the experience of the Great War changed him and his work. Written in the calm before the war, the title character seems equal parts hero, madman and pitiable pawn. It's a long way from the Good/Bad binaries of The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien, as Flieger notes, had long lamented the mythological "poverty" of his British homeland. Perhaps the forward thrust of history had to push one of Britain's great fantasy authors into renewing his country's mythological canon. Maybe Britain's show of strength and solidarity in the First and Second World Wars gave Tolkien something not to allegorize, but literalize in his fiction. Maybe before Tolkien could mythologize Britain, Britain had to mythologize itself.