A Cultural Juggernaut Ian Likes: The Lord Of The Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

It’s one of the most famous stories in all of twentieth century literature: Frodo Baggins, a hobbit, is given a ring by his uncle Bilbo, who came by it during his adventuring days when he was younger. However, Frodo is informed by the wizard Gandalf that is in fact the Ring of Power, forged by the dark lord Sauron, and that it must be destroyed before Sauron can rally his forces and take over the world of Middle-earth. Frodo sets off, accompanied by friends as well as emissaries from lands he has barely heard of, but not all of them will end the quest with him…

Seriously, I don’t really need to go too far into the background of this one, do I? Most people reading this will know how the entirety of the history of Middle-earth – of which The Hobbit and The Lord Of The Rings are only a small part – was created, don’t they?

OK… so John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was a philologist at Oxford who created imaginary languages for fun. One day in the early 1930s, he scribbled on a piece of paper (the back of someone’s exam, according to legend), “In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit” because he rather liked the sound of it. Then he began to wonder what sort of a creature a hobbit might be. Shortly after this he began linking the hobbits to his imaginary languages because they gave him a background to hang them on. He wrote The Hobbit (published in 1937) and then expanded on the story in the years after that (sending the chapters as they were written to his son Christopher, who was serving his country during World War II). This sequel was eventually published in three volumes (due to paper rationing after the aforementioned war) but is best known by the omnibus title The Lord Of The Rings.

Its success was slow in coming but it gradually became one of the best-loved novels of all time. It was a cult classic among undergraduate students in the United States during the 1960s and became irretrievably linked to the Hippie and conservation movements that many fans adhered to, because of the themes that Tolkien explored of how industrialization was bad for the soul as well as the environment.

I came to The Lord Of The Rings before I read The Hobbit, and while I don’t normally espouse reading a series out of order, for me it was a fortunate thing. When I eventually read The Hobbit, I was annoyed at what I perceived to be the cloying “written for children” tone of the book and the convenient dropping in and out of the plot that Gandalf did. Honestly, if I’d read it first, I probably wouldn’t have gone any further into Tolkien’s world.

I was 14 when I first read it. It was the heftiest book I owned at that point, coming in at 1200 pages. And I read it compulsively for about six months, over and over again. I just loved it so much. It was an amazing adventure story with lots of characters and loads of settings, the sort of story I was beginning to enjoy… although the beginning of The Two Towers always bugged me somewhat because I kept waiting for the action to get back to Frodo and Sam, rather than focus on the rest of the fellowship: I was used to stories in which the action bounced between the characters, rather than abandoning them for huge swathes of the book.

At any rate it became one of my core texts for a few years, a touchstone if you will. Then I started knocking about with some new friends when I got to University. They were smarter than me, they got better results, were wittier and more adroit at conversation and, well, stuff like The Lord Of The Rings was a bit déclassé: obviously it had been a landmark in its day, but now it was a bit old hat. Classist, you know? And sexist, too. Hardly any women in it, and those that are in it, hardly do anything.

Look, The Lord Of The Rings is classist and sexist but the story it tells is the problem, rather than Tolkien himself. I mean, I don’t think he queued up to get his copy of The Female Eunuch autographed, but from several accounts I’ve read, he was as attentive a teacher to his female students, few though they may have been, as he was to the male ones. And there’s a whole sequence of events surrounding Eowyn that only came about because Tolkien’s daughter thought there was more to her than a lovestruck princess. And, given that Tolkien was a translator of mediaeval texts and was clearly inspired by them, he is mostly keeping true to that milieu by having very few female characters in it. A weak defense, but still…

However, The Lord Of The Rings is definitely classist: Frodo is as close to a lord of the manor as you’ll get in the Shire, while loads of other characters are royalty, or adjacent to it. But this is a problem that you can lay at the feet of nearly any other fantasy novel published in the 1950s and more recently: I don’t think it’s something exclusive to Tolkien. Which doesn’t excuse it, I know, but it does make it a little easier to understand.

I also read Michael Moorcock’s essay “Epic Pooh” in his Wizardry And Wild Romance (1987) where he delivered a fairly hefty kicking to the trilogy. I had a lot of respect for Moorcock at the time (I still do), so I took a lot of what he said at face value because it lined up with a lot of what other people were saying to me. So I put Frodo and Co. away for a few years. I didn’t miss them: I was busy. Getting married, raising a family, working, all that stuff you do as an adult. I bought new books and discarded old ones, but somehow, The Lord Of The Rings always managed to stay with me. And I’m glad it did, because the movies came out…

I’d watched the Bakshi adaptation from the late-1970s, of course, but I didn’t count myself as a fan: in fact, I can probably trace my indifference towards adapted works to that movie, which is a whole other story. At any rate, my wife and I took ourselves off to see The Fellowship Of The Ring the day after it opened and we loved it. I’d followed the production of it and I’d thought that it would be in good hands when I discovered that they’d cast Christopher Lee as Saruman (I’d had my doubts about Peter Jackson because the only other film of his I’d seen at that point was Meet The Feebles – which I loved, but there was a bit of a distance between murderous, sex-crazed puppets and Tolkien). There’s a lot of discussion in a lot of places about what the films did and didn’t get right: however, to me they are as close to the books as you could hopefully get on screen, the extended versions especially. While they aren’t slavish adaptations, they get the main story ideas across beautifully and the characters all say and do things that I recognize from the books.

And, getting back to the books, I pulled out my old paperback again and fell in love with it once again. As an adult I enjoyed it even more, largely because I was able to see it as a piece of literature rather than just a fabulous adventure in a well-thought-out world. I even came to appreciate the poetry and how the use of it enhanced the characters and the settings and the world. Unlike his colleague C. S. Lewis, who had a huge understanding of poetry but a bit of a tin ear when it came to his own verse, Tolkien perfectly understood what he was writing and how to make it read and sound well – you only have to look at that original line, “In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit,” to see that he understands what meter and rhythm are.

As for the oft-complained about descriptions of trees and landscapes… I don’t really have a problem with them: the frequent complaints that “Tolkien needs an editor” which came out after the release of the movies are really complaints that he’s writing about things the reader doesn’t like or has no interest in. But the descriptions are really part of the world that the characters live in, and the characters inhabit their world; when Boromir wants to bring the Ring to Gondor, it’s not until we spend time there that we really understand just why Gondor was so important to him. It’s the same with the Hobbits and the Shire; their love of the place is only understood when we have spent some time there vicariously through the descriptions of it, mostly by Sam. It’s part of the reason why Tolkien is beloved by so many people with an environmentalist streak in them.

But this renaissance in my interest in Tolkien also helped me with the wider world: in the post-9/11 world that I was rediscovering the story in, there were a couple of quotes from Gandalf that did the rounds that were of a great comfort to many of us:

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo. “So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

And a quote about pity, also from Gandalf

“Many that live deserve death. Some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them, Frodo? Do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. Even the very wise cannot see all ends. My heart tells me that Gollum has some part to play in it, for good or evil, before this is over. The pity of Bilbo may rule the fate of many.”

Tolkien knew about mercy and pity. And Gandalf in this case was correct because Frodo fails in his mission to destroy the Ring. I remember reading it that first time and being appalled that a hero could fail in those last moments of a quest. Older me realized that Frodo had done the impossible by resisting the lure of the Ring for as long as he did, but younger me hadn’t been through any kind of wringer as yet, and the gradual realization that Bilbo had been right to spare Gollum, and that Frodo had also been right to spare him, despite Sam’s wishes to the contrary was really only properly appreciated by grown-up me. Their pity saved everything… except Frodo, who becomes too traumatized by his experiences to live happily ever after. Tolkien, who had served during World War 1, knew exactly what Frodo was going through, and his story after the destruction of the Ring mirrors the story of many veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress.

Frodo’s departure from Middle-earth, though, does spark my case for one of the greatest debates around the book: who is the hero of this story? Is it Frodo, the Ringbearer, who suffers so much for his cause? Is it Aragorn, the prince-in-hiding who becomes the true leader of the Fellowship and the King of Gondor in the final volume? Or is it – and here’s where my money goes – Samwise Gamgee, a humble hobbit who goes to hell and back again with his master and friend?

Obviously, it’s Sam. He’s shown as the most sensible of the hobbits, being prepared for any emergency; like Aragorn, he has a talent for extemporaneous poetry; and he rejects the seductive allure of the Ring, knowing – there’s that classism again – where his place is in the world. But the most telling moment comes at the end of the third volume with his utterance of the final words of the story: “Well, I’m back.” And what is that third volume called? The Return Of The King.

The story doesn’t really end there, though: there’s the follow-up book, The Silmarillion, released after Tolkien’s death, as well as many, many volumes of Middle-earth history and background material, edited by Tolkien’s son Christopher. I haven’t read very many of them, not because I don’t love delving further into the world (which I do) but because growing up on a small island at the bottom of the world, it was frequently hard to find them and they were a lot more expensive than regular paperbacks at the time. I’ve also read a ton of books about Tolkien and Middle-earth, but they are mainly about the way the books were constructed and written, rather than about the invented history of the place.

But my interest is primarily in the story and the writing, because like all good writers, Tolkien invites you to investigate his work deeper. In this case, it was probably the first time in my life that I examined a text like my teachers had been trying to get me to do for years. It started when I noticed that Theoden and Denethor had names that were practically anagrams of each other – and the relationships that they had with two of the hobbits – Merry and Pippin – were also similar: Theoden was like a father-figure to Merry, while Denethor acted more as a dispassionate mentor/employer to Pippin. I also noted the similarities between Gollum and Frodo: both tempted by the Ring, but only one of them ultimately consumed by it. I didn’t realise it at the time, but I was beginning to think a little deeper about my reading. When I finally got around to reading The Hobbit, I noticed that its first chapter (“An Unexpected Party”) bore a suspicious resemblance to the first chapter of The Lord Of The Rings (“A Long-expected Party”). I started looking at everything I read a little more forensically – not in the manner of Saruman, who left the path of wisdom by breaking something to find out what it is – but to discover a little more depth and meaning in it. I’m still not the deepest of readers, because I frequently get far too caught up in the story or the writing to pay full attention to what an author is trying to achieve, but I do appreciate the little nuggets of literary gold that I manage to find.

But this approach has also led to me often becoming a very disappointed rereader. When I revisit a story, I sometimes find that that malicious entity known as “The Suck Fairy” has been for a visit. You might have encountered this creature yourself: they get into the pages of a book you loved when you first read it and rearrange it somehow so that when you go back to it, and try to recapture the joy you first had, it has turned into something awful.

Fortunately, The Lord Of The Rings has managed to avoid any such malignance and remains one of my most treasured reads, simply because I’m able to take something new from it every time I take it off the shelf. And there’s not a lot of books you can say that about.

You can find out more about Tolkien and Middle-earth at https://www.tolkienestate.com/