J.R.R. Tolkien and Creativity I: Transitionality and the Creative Process

Abstract

J.R.R. Tolkien and Creativity I:Transitionality and the Creative Process John Rosegrant (bio) The popularity of J.R.R. Tolkien's fictional universe, remarkable from the start, has continued to expand since the appearance of Peter Jackson's movie adaptations. Wikipedia's list of the best-selling books of all time shows The Lord of the Rings (1954/2004) in third place and The Hobbit (1937) in sixth. Four out of five reasonably broad (although unscientific) polls conducted at the end of the last millennium came out with The Lord of the Rings rated the greatest book of the century, while in the fifth poll it was second only to the Bible (Shippey, 2000). Although Tolkien has been largely ignored by the psychoanalytic journals on PEP, his enormous appeal is worthy of psychoanalytic exploration. One reaction to his popularity has been to dismiss Tolkien's work as childish escapism: "juvenile trash" (Wilson, 1956, para 7); "The good boys, having fought a deadly battle, emerge at the end of it well, triumphant and happy, as boys would naturally expect to do" (Muir, 1955, p. 11). Other critics have countered that Tolkien addresses head-on and in great depth the traumas of modernity and war (see Croft, 2015; Curry, 1997; Hiley, 2011; Shippey, 2000). On a more psychological level, I have argued that Tolkien addresses the desire to retain experiences of enchantment during maturity (Rosegrant, 2016). I propose that Tolkien's work can be read as an examination of creative living that grew out of Tolkien's personal experience of creativity. In this first of two interconnected papers, I will present two episodes from Tolkien's creative life and examine how his work at times grew and at other times was inhibited by the struggle to establish and maintain transitional space. In the second paper, I will show ways in which Tolkien's work itself depicts the ongoing tension between transitional experience and perverse experience. [End Page 145] Tolkien experienced several traumatic losses (Carpenter, 2000; Garth, 2003; Rosegrant, 2016) that created sensitivity to these issues. In this paper, I will focus on specific experiences of loss and struggle to maintain access to transitionality as it affected his creativity at two points in time. In an essay throwing light on his creative viewpoint shortly before he commenced The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien stated that "the primal desire at the heart of Faerie [is] the realization, independent of the conceiving mind, of imagined wonder" (Tolkien, 2008, p. 42). Here Tolkien described a paradoxical state of consciousness: experience that is both subjective—imagined wonder—and objective—realized independent of the conceiving mind. Tolkien is saying that to enter Faerie, it is necessary to go through the doors of subjectivity and objectivity simultaneously. This vision of Tolkien's bears a notable similarity to Winnicott's (1953, 1967, 1971) description of transitional objects and transitional phenomena. For example, Winnicott stated that in addition to the internal world and the external world, the third part of the life of a human being […] is an intermediate world of experiencing, to which inner reality and external life both contribute. It is an area that is not challenged, because no claim is made on its behalf except that it shall exist as a resting-place for the individual engaged in the perpetual human task of keeping inner and outer reality separate and yet interrelated. (1971, p. 2) So, in Winnicottian terms, Tolkien's statement about the realization of imagined wonder means that Faerie exists in transitional space. But Tolkien also wrote that one of the three great benefits provided by fairy stories is recovery, which he defined as "seeing things as we are (or were) meant to see them—as things apart from ourselves" (2008, p.77). At first, hearing this sounds like the opposite of transitional space, emphasizing separateness rather than areas of interpenetration. But Tolkien's additional description of this phenomenon puts it in a different light: [End Page 146] We need […] to clean our windows; so that the things seen clearly may be freed from the drab blur of triteness or familiarity—from possessiveness […]things that are trite are things that we have appropriated, legally...