On the Shoulders of Giants
About three thousand years ago, when fellow Dorkadia staffer Hannah and I first became friends, J.R.R. Tolkien came up in conversation, I was first informed that she didn’t really care for Lord of the Rings. My response was – well, it was basically just a strangled squawking noise, but I was attempting to convey disbelief that any fantasy nerd could dislike the codex, the holy testament, at the root of our entire genre. Many years and many strangled squawking noises later (best conveyed as “Bwurgh?!”), I’ve encountered enough other unreconstructed heretics to consider that it is, in fact, possible to approach J.R.R. Tolkien with something other than unconditional love and worship.
So I reread LOTR. I reread the Hobbit. I reread the Silmarillion listened to Blind Guardian’s Nightfall In Middle Earth*. And I attempted to approach all these works, particularly the Holy Trinity, with measured enthusiasm and a critical eye. I tried to read these novels as simply novels.
As it turns out, that’s really fucking hard for me to do.
(*Sidebar: Blind Guardian is probably getting an article here before too long; the German band has spent a quarter-century mining literature, mythology, and fairy-tales for the most undeniably kickass nuggets. Nightfall is a symphonic-metal concept album about the Silmarillion. Seriously. It’s amazeballs.)
There’s a sort of mental checklist I carry with me when I’m reading speculative fiction, a set of things I look for in my reading. I like moral ambiguity and real human failings; colorful prose that doesn’t get too impressed with itself; actual loss and tragedy; and sex, while fun, is hilarious. Lord of the Rings addresses this checklist with mixed results. While there’s more moral gray in places than my memory gave it credit for, generally, the good guys are good and the bad guys are awful. The tragedy is mostly of the romantic, sailing-into-the-west sort, and Tolkien’s spectacular mythic prose is also singularly devoid of humor. It gets A+ marks for the portrayal of war’s atrociousness (albeit in a genteel, Oxford sort of way), but nobody bloody well exists below the waist.
In other words, if I just wrap it in a plain paper cover, it’s an overweeningly ambitious but flawed trilogy, something that maybe slots in on my bookshelf between Robin Hobb & R. Scott Bakker. It follows a tremendously enjoyable YA book, and is succeeded by a vast wealth of world-building appendices and notes to pick through. And yet I could no more give LOTR a “solid B+” kind of grade than I could I could say my grandmother’s matzoh ball soup was, you know, satisfying but not that great.* And I know I’m not the only one who feels this way; Grandpappy Tolkien, as heroic-fantasy purveyor David Eddings called him, has an exalted status among fantasy writers and fans. So why the hell is it so hard to approach his books rationally?
(*My grandma’s matzoh ball soup is the BEST. Fuck you.)
Universality
People who don’t really read speculative fiction love the shit out of Lord of the Rings. Its historical appeal to hippies and peaceniks is well known; hard-right Republican presidential candidate Rick “Don’t Google Me” Santorum used a Mount Doom metaphor in a campaign speech some years back. It’s taught in literature courses that wouldn’t touch HP Lovecraft or Robert Howard with a ten-foot red grading pen; Peter Jackson has built a house out of the money that people have thrown at him for his sprawling film adaptations. (Not with. Out of.) And so on.
There’s something to be said for getting there first, and LOTR has served as the fantasy codifier for many people. My sister is more likely to reign over an Overkill mosh pit than she is Westeros, but she’s schooled me on Merry and Pippin’s lineage; my dad, who reads nonfiction to fiction at a 20:1 rate, was nevertheless this close to showing up to Fellowship opening night in a cloak.
I don’t think nerds necessarily crave literary respect or anything; what’s nice is being understood, having common ground with people outside our circles. LOTR bridges that gap, partly because it uses mythical archetypes in a way that appeals to readers of all ages and backgrounds, and partly because it’s already there. Why build a new bridge when this one’s held up for sixty years without showing any signs of structural decay?
Influence
Let’s not beat around the bush: Tolkien created popular fantasy, and conceivably the entire idea of popular speculative fiction. Before LOTR, Howard, Lovecraft, Fritz Leiber, Edgar Rice Burroughs, et al plundered the depths of their imaginations for largely serialized pulp stories. The concept of the fantasy novel as we know it is largely due to Professor Tolkien and his wondrous mythology machine. LOTR granted fantasy respectability, and more importantly, he granted it broad commercial appeal. You can deserve all the critical acclaim in the world, but that doesn’t matter if nobody can find your damn books.
It’s not particularly revelatory to say that Tolkien influenced fantasy and that’s why people love him. But while I’m wearing my Captain Obvious cape anyway, take a moment to think about the vast spectrum of that influence. Books, films, games of every genre and platform; not just borrowing from LOTR, but existing in a space inescapably informed by its shadow. The Hard-Working Orc, card-carrying villain of a thousand settings, owes his beetle-browed existence to Tolkien; so, inescapably, does his opposite, the militant-but-honorable greenskin of Warcraft and its ilk.
It can be frustrating, of course, to see every single thing achieved by a latter-day fantasist traced back to an author who was in the grave before current stars could hold a pen. But even if his significance is overstated, there’s no getting away from the fact that fantasy exists in a post-Tolkien world, and that colors our perceptions in both directions.
The Wars
So far I’ve talked about contextual things; LOTR is beloved, often confusingly so, because of when it was written and who else likes it. Reasonable enough, but what about the books themselves? What about the damn words on the damn paper? Why can’t I just treat them like a normal fantasy novel?
I mean, I can try. I can rationally say that while Eowyn of Rohan is a trope-codifying badass without equal, women are otherwise given pretty short shrift; I can admit that Sauron’s famous manipulation and charm is all backstory, told, not shown, and by the time of LOTR he’s just a menacing presence of VILLAINOUS DARKNESS without much depth or on-screen interest. And yet it’s still the fucking Lord of the goddamn Rings!
Perhaps this third thing is also context, but it’s context for the writing, not the books, if that makes sense. A young Tolkien lived in the trenches of what he and everyone else thought was the Great War, and then he wrote most of his sprawling manuscript during the leadup to, and fighting of, World War II. These facts have been studied, debated, and regurgitated by literature scholars for half a century, to the point where the Professor himself had to flat-out inform the world that his great work was not an allegory for WW2, because if it was, among other things, Gandalf would’ve used the ring.
But without having to be allegory, LOTR still comes fully packaged with a world informed by the horrors of the first half of the twentieth century. The misery of the trenches is visible in Tolkien’s subtle deploration of glorious medieval war; the human cost of military industrialization peeks through every bucolic Shire scene (described as “Tolkien’s love letter to the English countryside”) and the oft-repeated villainy of industry-obsessed Saruman.
And above all else, LOTR’s great struggle of Good vs. Evil, capital letters and all, owes its debt to Tolkien’s living through a real-life struggle of Good vs. Evil. Sauron lacks nuance because there, unfolding in the newspapers and correspondence that passed before the Professor’s eyes, was the rise of a tyrant without scruple, compassion, or nuance. Aragorn, Gandalf and Frodo are presented as shining heroes, their flaws and foibles downplayed, to match the Churchills and de Gaulles and Roosevelts of Tolkien’s time.
Other authors have lived through conflict since, and the Middle Eastern world particularly has a lot to offer to the fantasy canon. But when it comes to Western literature, it has to be remembered while Tolkien was writing about the struggle of the scattered forces of light against an inhuman Dark Lord, the closest thing the modern world has seen to that struggle was taking place, on the global stage. Bombs were falling in London; prisoners were being marched off the shores of Normandy. Sauron and Hitler lost in the end, but while the story of Middle-Earth was taking shape, one of those things was still uncertain.
With all this said, in the abstract, you can separate a work of literature from its context; I can’t do that with Lord of the Rings, and I’m not certain that I should. Give LOTR a reread, if you haven’t for a while. I think you’ll be glad you did.
