Countryside Myths of Zofia Stryjeńska & J. R. R. Tolkien

the_lord_of_the_rings_forum-0846501295.jpg, full-width, Situated in Waikato, New Zealand, Hobbiton served as a filming location for ‘The Lord of the Rings’ and ‘The Hobbit’ trilogies written by J.R.R. Tolki

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Antiquity, nature and vitality permeated the vision of the Polish-Slavic countryside in Zofia Stryjeńska’s pre-war paintings. And she didn’t give up this focus after World War II, when the former ‘princess of Polish painting’ had to live in exile until her death in 1976 in Geneva. The myth of the countryside that she still believed in kept her company better than an audience. Yet there was someone in the West who could have understood her desire to believe.

Zofia Stryjeńska left Poland for good in 1947, moving to Paris and later to Geneva and, according to her grandson, ‘vanishing […] quickly from the awareness of her audience and even of art historians’. She herself didn’t forget and continued painting colourful scenes located in the Polish countryside and collecting newspaper clippings concerning Poland. She also didn’t give up album projects based on her pre-war works featuring rural Slavic motifs. The struggle for the publication of Polish Costumes and Dances or Ethnographical Polish Costumes in London displayed Stryjeńska’s continuing belief in Polish uniqueness. She was clear on that in June 1947, explaining in her diaries:

I’m doing the covers in English now, and I’ll try to get the texts translated as well so that the Anglo-Saxons can learn something about Poland because they are powerful and their opinion is important to us; and they, poor chumps, know nothing about us except what hostile anti-Polish propaganda proclaims. Meanwhile, my God! Compare the folk types of other nations with our people’s beauty and the richness of its imagination – with its temperament, colour, charm – Polish beauty beats them all. And the only reason the whole world isn’t stunned by this miracle is that it doesn’t know about its loveliness, hasn’t seen it, doesn’t even have the slightest idea of its existence because we’re not on the scene!

[‘Chleb prawie że powszedni. Kronika jednego życia’ (Almost Daily Bread: A Chronicle of One Life) by Zofia Stryjeńska, ed. Magdalena Budzińska & Angelika Kuźniak, 441, trans. JC]

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Zofia Stryjeńska, 'Harvesters', 1950s, reproduction of a painting from the exhibition of Zofia Stryjeńska’s works at the 'Panorama' gallery at the PKP railway station in Tarnów, 2017, photo: Paweł Topolski/PAP

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Ethnographical Polish Costumes was never published; it was a bad moment for the publishing market. The following year, Stryjeńska had to put together a portfolio as a down payment for a return ticket for her son Jan, who was visiting his mother in Paris. That was her normal way of making ends meet: selling her works in exchange for (absurdly little) money to cover immediate needs.

The constant pressure of problems with covering the cost of living must have resulted in bad moments, deepened by nostalgia for her homeland. She might have been impressed by English ‘power’, but she didn’t know English. She might have written that Paris was the ‘heart of the world’, but there was no ‘richness of [our people’s] imagination’ on Rue de Chabrol. She was interested in the cultural life of the West and did not lose the conviction that the Polish theme could make it even more interesting. The year 1950 was a symbolic moment: Stryjeńska stopped writing her diaries. One of her last entries referred to a public lecture on ‘Polish customs and rituals’ which she gave in Brussels, trying to convince the audience that:

Poland is an exceptional country because, while keeping abreast of the spirit of modern culture and progress in every field, it has managed to preserve and cherish its ancient rituals in as vital a condition as they were of old, thereby showing deep respect for its traditions, which has always been a distinguishing feature of the Slavic mentality.

[‘Zofia Stryjeńska’ by Światosław Lenartowicz, 122]

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Zofia Stryjeńska, 'Madonna', circa 1950, photo: Sopot Auction House/Sopot Auction House – Antiques, Works of Art

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Controversy

Rituals such as harvest festivals, dating back to pre-Christian times, might have served as an example of ‘the deep respect for their traditions’ but also as a sort of magical imagination that Stryjeńska seemed to share with her heroes – or despite them. It is not hard to argue that rural life was always more about a sense of reality. The Polish novel Konopielka by Edward Redliński conveys a compelling argument in favour of this thesis, according to which all folk traditions address the need for stability and order rather than magic. Peasants would have no fascination for ‘ancient rituals’ if these old methods of facing the unexplained did not provide relief from their anxieties.

Whether this argument is valid everywhere, as Maxim Gorky expressed by stating that ‘peasants are the same everywhere’, touches on the controversy of the particularity versus the universality of human nature. Fernand Braudel disagreed with the Russian author in a very historian-like manner by listing examples of different conditions and occupations of peasant life from various places and times. ‘There were a thousand ways of being a peasant and a thousand ways of being poor’, stated this French historian from the Annales School in the second volume of Civilization and Capitalism. A philosopher could answer here that all these differences were particular ways of coping with the same problems, which makes them universal.

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Zofia Stryjeńska, 'Cracovian Wedding', 1940s, reproduction of a painting from the exhibition 'A Moment of Great Art' at the Agra Art gallery, 2024, photo: Włodzimierz Wasyluk/Forum

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The fascination of intellectuals with the rustic way of life throughout the 19th and 20th centuries remains less questionable. The supposedly primordial countryside isolated from cosmopolitan trends and untouched by industrialization tempted many people from the cultural milieu. Among them were those who had a kind of mythical way of thinking, understood here as a tendency to make up realities as an alternative to those of daily life, those who had imagination and an eagerness to believe in its products. The relationship between myth and truth constitutes the subject of a never-ending debate among historians and philosophers fighting over the definition of the latter. One of these disputants, Leszek Kołakowski, tried to change the course of the discussion by writing that myths answer the human ‘desire for meaning’, not truth. They cannot be either true or false. What we can prove, continued this Oxford philosopher from Poland, is that desires are real. ‘Real is what people really desire’ and so are the myths, argued the author of The Presence of Myth and Religion.

The reality of myth might be explained with different words. Another Oxford scholar tried to convince readers that the ‘secondary world’ he invented in his literary writings remains real as long as the reader willingly adheres to the ‘suspension of disbelief’ (On Fairy-Stories). That scholar, J. R. R. Tolkien, the author of a poem called Mythopoeia (‘myth-making’ in Greek), created Middle-earth by mixing the countryside spirit with medieval myths, aiming for a new-old ‘mythology for England’, as he stated in a letter from 1950 – the same year that Zofia Stryjeńska gave a lecture on Polish-Slavic rituals in Brussels. A passion for mythology and the countryside created a surprising bridge between J. R. R. Tolkien and Zofia Stryjeńska, two imaginative artists who most probably never met.

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Zofia Stryjeńska, photo: private archive. John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, photo: Getty Images

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Stryjeńska & Tolkien

Even though the author of Lord of the Rings despised the allegorical interpretations of his works, in 1964 he made no secret on BBC that ‘Hobbits are just rustic English people’. Two years later, in the first newspaper interview for The Guardian, Tolkien admitted that the idea of Shire residents came from the village people of Sarehole Mill in Worcestershire, where he spent the best years of his childhood:

It was a kind of lost paradise[…]. There was an old mill that really did grind corn with two millers, a great big pond with swans on it, a sandpit, a wonderful dell with flowers, a few old-fashioned village houses and, further away, a stream with another mill. I always knew it would go – and it did.

[https://www.theguardian.com/books/1991/dec/28/jrrtolkien.classics]

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Situated in Waikato, New Zealand, Hobbiton served as a filming location for ‘The Lord of the Rings’ and ‘The Hobbit’ trilogies written by J.R.R. Tolkien, photo: Hobbiton™ Movie Set / Cover Images / Forum

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The writer was born in 1892, one year after the Polish princess of painting. The period of his ‘lost paradise’ lasted from 1896 till 1900, when Stryjeńska was still the ‘child of Kraków’. They both grew up at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, both died in the 1970s, so that the differentiating impact of Braudel’s factor of time might be ignored. What about other differences and similarities? Both were Catholics and both were inspired by pagan mythologies. The professor of Anglo-Saxon many times expressed his attachment to the Old English language, trying to reinvent it within the culture and languages of Middle-earth. It is also commonly argued that Hobbits reflected pre-Norman Anglo-Saxons.

Furthermore, their love for nature and antiquity only became stronger in the post-war era. While the stubborn Polish princess was telling the Western audience a story of ‘Polish ancient rituals’, Tolkien was persuading English editors that a manuscript of over a thousand pages, inspired by Christian theology alongside Anglo-Saxon myths, decorated with his own illustrations, should be published in one volume (eventually it was printed in three volumes in 1954–55). Parallel to the English artist, Stryjeńska shifted her attention to religious paintings (above all, Madonnas), selling them mainly to the Polish diaspora in the United States and France.

What about the second factor proposed by Braudel, about places? Stryjeńska was painting Poland, Tolkien was inspired by England, which was far less rural than Poland at that time. After leaving Sarehole Mill, the writer moved with his family to a tenement house in industrial Birmingham (Peaky Blinders could serve here as an illustration). Stryjeńska remained in culturally prospering Kraków, an old city nurtured by the traditions of the Polish intelligentsia and trends imposed by the Habsburg Empire. Ultimately both became enchanted by landscapes and mentalities that were not urban. The fact that England was much more shaped by the industrialization process was of lesser importance if we accept that rural life and society remained as it was in the old days, in line with Tolkien’s hopes. English 20th-century literature was familiar with such a wish, as Roger Scruton demonstrated in England: An Elegy.

If the visions of country life by Stryjeńska and Tolkien were yet dissimilar, this cannot be explained only by differences in their local landscapes. Worth considering is how they approached the social mentality of their countrymen and how it was grounded in their personal characteristics. Both Tolkien's Hobbits and figures painted by Stryjeńska showed a deep attachment to everything that was ancient and natural. More complex remains the question of their vitality. Stryjeńska argued here for ‘the richness of [Polish folk] imagination – with its temperament, colour, charm’. Hobbits seemed to be more down-to-earth:

merry folk […] with mouths apt to laughter, and to eating and drinking. And laugh they did, and eat, and drink, often and heartily, being fond of simple jests at all times, and of six meals a day (when they could get them) […]. Growing food and eating it occupied most of their time.

[‘The Fellowship of the Ring’ by J. R. R. Tolkien, 18, 28]

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Even if the Hobbits’ lifestyle cannot be limited to eating and drinking, the same routine and tranquillity could be found in all of their day-to-day rituals. Everything was supposed to be predictable, unhurried. Adventures were treated with hostility, hence the eccentric status of Bilbo and Frodo. On the other hand, every moment of the day was celebrated the same as birthday parties – which they enjoyed a lot. That was when they showed a substantial sense of humour, a predilection for discussions and a taste for long, heroic stories. Doesn’t this imply the ‘richness of […] imagination’?

The real difference comes with the ‘temperament, colour, charm’. Hobbits preferred a combination of yellow and green, which made them indeed merry and bright. Yet they appeared muted compared to Stryjeńska’s Poles, in the distinctively drawn lines of their bodies, clothes and landscapes and wearing an explosion of contrasting colours. The Hobbits’ temperament and charm, even if broad and hearty, remained accordingly more temperate. They lacked that élan vital which Stryjeńska was trying to achieve with the rhythmic balance of the figures she portrayed.

The traditionalism of Hobbits was about preserving a slow life, while the characters painted by Stryjeńska took advantage of traditions to give vent to their energy, to show off their physical abilities, to make advances to each other. The love for nature and antiquity meant, for the Hobbits, understanding the nostalgia for the good old days and fondness for a ‘well-ordered’ world. In contrast, Stryjeńska’s peasants seemed to value the inner strength of nature and praised mystical celebrations in order to break the routine of daily life, allowing themselves to lose control of their own inner desires. Satisfaction with a ‘well-ordered’ state of being wouldn’t appeal to them.

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Miss Priscilla Tolkein, youngest daughter of British novelist JRR Tolkein, with the original pen and ink drawing of the 'Hall at Bag-End' and an enlargement of a stamp depicting it which is to be issued by the Royal Mail, on Thursday 26th February 2004, in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the first two parts of 'The Lord of The Rings'. Tolkeins drawings are permanantly housed at the Bodleian Library, Oxford where the photgraph was taken, photo by Fiona Hanson - PA Images/PA Images via Getty Images

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This is, of course, the difference between mythical Polish peasants and their mythical English counterparts. It is impossible to determine if these visions were true or false, which doesn’t necessarily mean they were not real. They were certainly connected with the personalities of the authors. Tranquil Tolkien, vigorous Stryjeńska? Perhaps. Traditionalists aren’t the same everywhere.

_^SOURCES:

^{Fernand Braudel.}^{Civilization and Capitalism}^{. Vol. 2,}^{The Wheels of Commerce}^{. New York, 1983.}
^{Humphrey Carpenter.}^{J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography}^{. New York, 1977.}
^{Leszek Kołakowski.}^{The Presence of Myth}^{. Chicago, 2001.}
^———.^{Religion: If There Is No God… On God, the Devil, Sin and Other Worries of the So-Called Philosophy of Religion}^{. New York, 1982.}
^{Angelika Kuźniak.}^{Stryjeńska: Diabli Nadali}^{. Wołowiec, 2015.}
^{Światosław Lenartowicz.}^{Zofia Stryjeńska}^.^Olszanica,^2018.
^{Roger Scruton.}^{England: An Elegy}^{. London, 2008.}
^{Zofia Stryjeńska.}^{Chleb prawie że powszedni. Kronika jednego życia}^{. Edited by M. Budzińska and Angelika Kuźniak. Wołowiec, 2016.}
^{J. R. R. Tolkien.}^{The Fellowship of the Ring}^{. London, 1982.}
^———.^{Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien}^{. Edited by Humphrey Carpenter. Boston, 1995.}
^———.^{Tolkien: On Fairy-Stories}^{. Edited by Verlyn Flieger and Douglas Anderson. Glasgow, 2014.}

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