An Unexpected Adventure

I took a B.A. Degree in Latin and English Literature at Luther College in1966. The next year I went to Oxford, England, as a nanny, with the chance to attend lectures in literature at the colleges. I didn’t know at the time how much the study of literature had been influenced by two traditions which were fought out in the 1930’s at the universities at Oxford and at Cambridge. Looking back, I see clearly that the struggle was still being played out when I got there. And of course I had a point of view.

At Oxford, colleges taught language and literature, with an emphasis on language. The people who influenced this teaching included J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis and their fellows. For them language was more than human speech. It claimed a divine origin and was the means by which God created the cosmos. For Owen Barfield, “Language was the fossil record of the history of the evolution of human consciousness.” For Tolkien, it was “a fallen human instrument and a precious divine gift; a supreme art, and as Word, a name for God.”

At Oxford, most lectures were in early English and its origins. The professors felt you didn’t need a tutor to read contemporary literature! As I saw myself a future writer, however, I gravitated to the one professor, Francis Warner at the recently-built St. Catherine's College, who lectured in 20th Century literature. How did he get there? I look back and find that, of course, he had come from Cambridge!

At Cambridge, a more science-dominated institution, a revolution had been brewing. I.A. Richards and F.R. Leavis felt that “English studies must be cut free from the classical scholarly tradition in every respect.” They developed what they called “New Criticism,” a formal technique in which the text itself was studied carefully without special consideration of its historical context or cultural influence. The two approaches to literature, from Oxford and Cambridge, were in underlying agreement, but bitter battles were fought. Looking back, I now see that the canon I was taught came straight out of Cambridge.

All of this was dramatized for me recently in The Fellowship - The Literary Lives of the Inklings, by Philip and Carol Zaleski. This book reminded me of how I had turned up my silly little nose at the “fantasy literature” of the Inklings, despite much involvement in it in my family. My mother was a member of the C.S. Lewis Society and many of my cousins read and talked about him. I read The Hobbit by Tolkien early, but never followed up with The Lord of the Rings, despite thorough reading of it by my siblings. As a result of the Zaleskis’ book, however, and also re-thinking of my own, I am now immersed in close reading of Tolkien’s masterwork.

When I was younger, the self-conscious exploration of modern literature was deeply interesting to me. I read some James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence E.M. Forster, and loved Virginia Woolf without reservation. The precision with which the self was described, the depths plumbed, the generosity of these authors with their lives appealed to my own determined self-making. By this time, however, my self made and accepted, I am considerably less interested in the personal idiosyncrasies in which this strain of literature continues to obsess. Perhaps the universal is getting lost in the process.

At any rate, my current crusade is for awareness of and attention to the value of everyday life, especially life lived together with our families and friends. Tolkien’s work speaks amply to this. For him, according to the Zaleskis, fantasy was a higher form of art, an elvish craft. Fairy tales were a door opening on divine truth. But he lived in an Oxford which was not much larger than a village. He could walk or bicycle from his home to the college. He could meet with his friends at a pub to drink, smoke a pipe and talk about stories in the center of town. Middle-earth was for him simply objective reality. Tolkien was a realist. He said, “I am in fact a Hobbit,” that his work “was written in my life’s blood.”

In my family, the unique combination of John Kronlokken and Florence Frost has become known as “ Kronlokken-ness” and it bears a great resemblance to Tolkien’s hobbits. Like hobbits, Kronlokkens are modest and generous, like gardens and trees, and are capable of courage when necessary. They tend to hide their light under a bushel and, I happen to know, some of them much prefer being barefoot! In the mid-80’s I published a family newspaper called The Intercoastal Hobbit. Some of the stories related in it made their way into the series, So Are You to My Thoughts.

The Lord of the Rings shows that it is only the truly humble who can be trusted with power. It is the homely goodness of the hobbits, the everyday wisdom of their shire, their voluntary suffering quest which saves the world from the horrors of a wielder of absolute power. Perhaps I cannot claim so much for Kronlokkens, my many siblings, their children and children’s children. But it is clear to me that they are the salt of the earth.