Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

What Tolkien Knew About Love

Like Henry Darger, he created an epic fantasy. Why is Tolkien remembered, and Darger nearly forgotten?

“Bilbo Comes to the Huts of the Raft-Elves,” an illustration for “The Hobbit” by J.R.R. Tolkien, July 1937.Credit...Bodleian Libraries, MS/The Tolkien Estate Limited 1937, via The Morgan Library & Museum.

Contributing Opinion Writer

In a hole in the ground there lived a man writing “The Hobbit.”

O. K., it wasn’t a hole in the ground; it was 20 Northmoor Road in Oxford, England, where, in the drawing room of a spacious, comfortable home, Prof. J.R.R. Tolkien wrote “The Hobbit,” and later “Lord of the Rings.”

Meanwhile, in a room in an apartment in Chicago, there lived a man writing “The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion.”

This was Henry Darger: American author, outsider artist and visionary. His 15,145-page, single-space manuscript describes an epic world of fantastical beasts and charmed children, fighting against a system in which the young are enslaved. His book and its accompanying illustrations were unknown until after his death, when they were discovered in his apartment, 851 West Webster Avenue, in Lincoln Park.

I thought about these two overlapping lives last week — Tolkien the professor, Darger the hospital janitor. Two Catholics, orphaned young, both born in 1892, both dying in 1973. I was taking in the exhibition of Tolkien’s manuscripts and maps and artwork at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York. There I stared at the relics of Middle-earth: original manuscripts, watercolors, a roughed-out map of Gondor in the author’s own hand.

I remembered reading those books in 1973, when they seemed like a lifeboat in which I could row away from the world. But I was no Aragorn — or for that matter, Arwen. Even as a teenager, it seemed clear to me that the quest my life demanded was one I was simply too frightened to take on.

It was a world that Henry Darger had his doubts about as well. “In the Realms of the Unreal” tells the story of a planet that Earth orbits as a moon. That world is populated by Blengigomeneans, gigantic winged beings with curved horns, who assist in the rebellion against the Glandelinians, the cruel overlords who enslave the innocent.

Image
“They Escape Again by Overpowering Guards" and "Are Seized by Pursuing Glandelinians,” by Henry Darger.Credit...Kiyoko Lerner/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/The Estate of Henry Darger, via Art Resource, NY

Now, over a century since the men were born, Tolkien endures as the author of some of the most popular books of all time; Darger is revered but obscure, the poster child for the genre now known as “outsider art.”

The randomness of life notwithstanding, how to explain the differences in the two men’s fates? Surely education played no small role, the scholarship of Tolkien standing in sharp contrast to that of Darger, who was almost entirely self-taught. But this doesn’t feel like the whole story to me.

As I stood there in the Morgan Library, I thought about Tolkien’s great romance, the legend of Beren and Lúthien, which appears in “The Lord of the Rings” and as a stand-alone novel. It was hard, as I considered this star-crossed couple, not to imagine the role that love had played in the life of their creator.

Tolkien had been through a place darker than Mordor by the end of World War I: “Junior officers were being killed off” at the rate of “a dozen a minute,” he once wrote. To leave his wife, Edith, for the war “was like a death.”

Back in England after the fighting, Tolkien was walking through a forest with Edith one day. “We walked in a wood where hemlock was growing, a sea of white flowers.” Then Edith turned to him, and danced.

It was this vision of the woman he loved that inspired Tolkien’s tale of Beren, who returns from death to be with the woman he adores. “Among the tales of sorrow and of ruin,” that story begins, there are “yet some in which amid weeping there is joy and under the shadow of death light that endures.”

Darger spent much of his life in isolation, haunted by his adolescence in the Illinois Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children. One biographer suggests that before he was committed (by his own father), he was the victim of sexual predators on West Madison Street in Chicago, a seedy area of grungy bars and flophouses at the time.

In his fiction, Darger’s characters sometimes escape their chains. At other moments in the story, a darker fate awaits them.

In any case, there was no Edith Tolkien for him, no moment in the forest where a lover danced, surrounded by white flowers.

Tolkien and his wife are buried together, in Wolvercote Cemetery, in Oxford. Below his name on the tomb is chiseled “Beren.” Below hers, “Lúthien.”

Henry Darger is buried alone in All Saints Cemetery in Des Plaines, Ill. His gravestone reads: “Artist.” And just below this: “Protector of Children.”

I was thinking about the fates of Tolkien and Darger as I left the Morgan, but to be honest, I was also considering my own. Like most writers, I worry sometimes about whether my work will endure, whether any of the words I have written have made any difference.

I walked into the streets of Midtown Manhattan and felt the sunshine on my aging face. It was a beautiful morning in New York City, the first blush of spring in the air. And I remembered a day 30 years ago, when the woman I loved first turned to me, and danced.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.

Jennifer Finney Boylan, a contributing opinion writer, is a professor of English at Barnard College and the author of the novel “Long Black Veil.” @JennyBoylan

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT