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The Lord of the Rings is not a trilogy from any but the publisher’s perspective: the story fits into three volumes, but it is not in three parts. Tolkien divided it into six “books,” and each book does have a unified field of vision, but none of them can stand on their own and none would ever be read alone. In fact, they are bound together by cliff-hanger-type endings. It is really one story, one novel, if you will; which makes it all the more remarkable an achievement, because it is not easy to get people to read a 1,200 page novel. This would seem to be especially true for adolescents; and yet most fans of the book probably read it as adolescents.

To judge from the “Fantasy” section of bookstores, each offering dozens of multiple-volume epic tales which (to an outsider) seem to resemble The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien has been much imitated, though it is not for me to say if he has been surpassed. The Fantasy genre is not one that appeals to me (fiction itself barely appeals to me; reality is my main interest); and the people who are attracted to it seem to have remained in a kind of adolescence that has little charm. There may be many gems in the genre, but it would take much mining to get them out, one feels.

Tolkien deserves much of the blame for this. There are passages in The Lord of the Rings which are woefully, terribly bad, as bad as any literature can be; and if Tolkien invented this type of badness, he deserves a muttered curse or two to prick him a bit in purgatory.

Eärendil was my sire, who was born in Gondolin before its fall; and my mother was Elwing, daughter of Dior, son of Lúthien of Doriath. I have seen three ages in the West of the world, and many defeats, and many fruitless victories. I was the herald of Gil-galad and marched with his host. I was at the Battle of Dagorlad before the Black Gate of Mordor, where we had the mastery: for the spear of Gil-galad and the Sword of Elendil, Aiglos and Narsil, none could withstand. I beheld the last combat on the slopes of Orodruin, where Gil-galad died, and Elendil fell, and Narsil broke beneath him: but Sauron himself was overthrown, and Isildur cut the Ring from his hand with the hilt-shard of his father’s sword, and took it for his own. (vol. 1, p.293)

And if the Rohirrim at their onset were thrice outnumbered by the Haradrim alone, soon their case became worse; for new strength came now streaming to the field out of Osgiliath. There they had been mustered for the sack of the City and the rape of Gondor, waiting on the call of their captain. He now was destroyed; but Gothmog the lieutenant of Morgul had flung them into the fray; Easterlings with axes, and Variags of Khand, Southrons in scarlet, and out of Far Harad black men like half-trolls with white eyes and red tongues. (3.133).

“Gothmog the Lieutenant of Morgul” sums up the problem very nicely. There are many, many faults here, and it is worth investigating at least a few of them more fully.

First of all, let us begin with the last line: “black men like half-trolls with white eyes and red tongues.” I will not call the book racist, but it is definitely British, and has a very limited cultural horizon. I think it can be demonstrated that its author, born in the 19th century, believed in the superiority of white people. Taking one’s own people as normative and finding “otherness” repulsive is fairly normal and does not require any special condemnation. But it does limit the book’s usefulness in the broader world. Middle-Earth is a fantasy for white people: in Tolkien’s world human goodness is betokened by height and whiteness. Even the elves, dwarves, wizards, and hobbits of the book are only archetypal variations on forms of whiteness; it is only among evil creatures that you will find the attributes of other peoples. One orc is described as “of a small breed, black-skinned, with wide and snuffling nostrils” (3.233). Many orcs have “slanting eyes”, and among men slanting eyes is a reliable indicator in the narrative of malice. The good army fights on horses; the bad army uses elephants. Besides the black-skinned and slanted-eyed orcs, there are “swarthy” men as well who fight for “the Dark Lord.”

This whole complex of values is symbolized by the favored Tolkien adjective “fair,” which means “light-colored,” “beautiful,” and “just.” Admittedly, Tolkien did not invent the word. These values are built into the English language, and Tolkien was its student. Martin Luther King referred several times to a study which listed the ways in which the English language is racist: he noted that there were more than two hundred terms where darkness indicated evil. We like to think that “black skin” is value-neutral; but “black heart” is generally not. And there are words like “denigrate” which are quite negative in connotation.

Not that Tolkien would ever use a word like “denigrate.” In The Hobbit Tolkien showed himself as perhaps the greatest master of the Anglo-Saxon English vocabulary that ever lived; open to any page of the book and you will find textbook illustrations of usage of such words as “grim,” “bleak,” “dour,” “gruff,” “grumble,” “gripe,” “gloom,” and dozens of other untranslatable words. His diction almost lacks Latinisms, an extraordinary achievement in a very Latin language. This is true of The Lord of the Rings as well. The two long passages quoted above contain precious few Latin derivatives, almost none of which feel Latinate (“victory” was a central Roman concept, but the word seems quite at home in our language). But despite this fact, the book does not have the same diction as The Hobbit; and consequently, it does not have the same tone. Tolkien instead aims at something different in The Lord of the Rings: something foreign, distant, and epic, while still yoked to a certain Anglo-saxon idiom. Many of course have been pleased with the result, but certainly one of the casualties was his simple-Anglo-Saxon flavor.

The book’s language is first and foremost transformed by the presence of a tremendous number of “foreign” words, that is to say, Tolkien’s own Middle-Earth words and names. These create the dominant linguistic feel of the book. This was one of Tolkien’s great talents, no doubt; he had a natural facility for naming. Many of the placenames are simply excellent, and stay in your head forever as perfect indicators of the things described: the Mines of Moria, Rivendell, Lothlorien, Minas Tirith, hobbits. And Tolkien had a deep love of the organic system of naming things, and your heart cannot help being warmed by it. Of course the children of Ents are “Entings,” and of course they are looking for their “Entwives,” and their river is the “Entwash.” Of course “Isengard” is the main strategic locus on the river Isen. Of course you have to portage your canoe at the “North and South Undeeps.” The love and genius Tolkien bestowed on the map of Middle-Earth makes you wish he had been around in America during the 19th century, when a whole continent beggared the minds of its surveyors and had to settle for a pathetic congeries of recycled Old World place-names ineptly applied.

But alas Tolkien writes as if terrified that all his naming genius will go untapped, and he must use it as often as possible. The effect is like being with a friend who sees it as his one duty in life to evangelize for one thing, which he feels is unjustly neglected by all the world and will perish without his utmost effort on its behalf, and you cannot talk to him but of this one thing.

Some had gone north beyond the springs of the Hoarwell into the Ettenmoors; and others had gone west, and with the help of Aragorn and the Rangers had searched the lands far down the Greyflood, as far as Tharbad, where the old North Road crossed the river by a ruined town. Many had gone east and south; and some of these had crossed the mountains and entered Mirkwood, while others had climbed the pass at the source of the Gladden River, and had come down into Wilderland and over the Gladden Fields and so at length had reached the old home of Radagast at Rhosgobel. Radagast was not there; and they had returned over the high pass that was called the Dimrill Stair. The sons of Elrond, Elladan and Elrohir, were the last to return; they had made a great journey, passing down the Silverlode into strange country, but of their errand they would not speak to any save to Elrond. (1.329)

None of these are bad names, and indeed there is a pleasure to be had in names. But catalogues of fictional locales (and people) which are little more than names grow old. None of the placenames in the above passage have any importance in the story (Mirkwood featured in The Hobbit, but that is all). Of course, these names probably have entries in some glossary written by Tolkien, with long (fake) descriptions of the etymology of the name, the history of the place, its geology, flora and fauna, and so forth. Here we see the morbus modernus creeping into Tolkien’s work. First of all, despite the feints towards the old-fashioned style, what Tolkien was creating was a jargon, a linguistic mode of inflation, obfuscation, and exclusion (these three always go together). All I need say about it is that it is never good: it is always a retreat from simplicity and reality, and in many ways it is at odds with Tolkien’s better insight.

The other great linguistic phenomenon that alters the feel of The Lord of the Rings is the pursuit of epic grandeur. The jargon is a subset of this; but the problem is found in Tolkien’s use of English as well.

Epic is a difficult genre. Life is grand and beautiful, and so grand and beautiful language is not entirely out of place in describing it. There is a pleasure in reading great speeches set in the midst of terrible battles, if you sense some kinship between the nobility of the language and the nobility of the war. This can even excuse the artificiality of the genre. As great as Achilles was, we can be certain he did not always speak in dactylic hexameter. Nevertheless, all this beauty and grandeur must be tempered by a great deal of dirt and truth. There is no genre more difficult to work in.

Tolkien stumbles nearly as often as he strides as an epic poet. His actual efforts in verse are pathetic – I cannot think of any writer in English whose poems are so much read and so little admired (your eyes have to at least linger somewhat over them, they occur so frequently in the book; the best is the nine-line effort “One Ring to rule them all,” &c., but as a rule they are mostly fit to be cut). His prose efforts are better: he often describes great deeds in good, straight narrative, and he has a fine eye for the act that stands in symbolic relation to the whole. But there is much that is questionable.

Fey he seemed, or the battle-fury of his fathers ran like new fire in his veins, and he was borne up on Snowmane like a god of old, even as Oromë the Great in the battle of the Valar when the world was young. His golden shield was uncovered, and lo! it shone like an image of the Sun, and the grass flamed into green about the white feet of his steed. For morning came, morning and a wind from the sea; and darkness was removed, and the hosts of Mordor wailed, and terror took them, and they fled, and died, and the hoofs of wrath rode over them. (3.124)

This is trying way too hard. The speechifying is often quite dreadful as well.

“Need brooks no delay, yet late is better than never,” said Éomer. “And mayhap in this time shall the old saw be proved truer than ever before since men spoke with mouth.” (3.120)

What oft was said, but ne’er so poorly expressed. It would be hard to make that sentence more awkward than it is – in fact, it is almost pleasingly awkward, so bad it is campy, a kind of parody of itself. Readers of ancient epic will see the pleonasm immediately – “spoke with mouth” – and that will give them some delight, but Homer and Vergil had the pleasure of meter to smooth over anything intellectually untoward. I think of Vergil’s line:

quadrupedumque putrem cursu quatit ungula campum.

Its literal meaning – “the hooves of the quadrupeds strike the crumbling soil in their course” – is superfluous, pure pleonasm – the value of the whole is in rendering, in musical form, the rhythm of the thing described. Tolkien’s prose lacks this, and it sounds as awkward as a literal translation. Look at the following passage:

But at last she said: “Lords, you are weary and shall now to your beds with such ease as can be contrived in haste. But tomorrow fairer housing shall be found for you.”

But Aragorn said: “Nay, lady, be not troubled for us! If we may lie here tonight and break our fast tomorrow, it will be enough. For I ride on an errand most urgent, and with the light of morning we must go.”

She smiled on him and said: “Then it was kindly done, lord, to ride so many miles out of your way to bring tidings to Éowyn, and to speak with her in her exile.”

“Indeed no man would count such a journey wasted,” said Aragorn, “and yet, Lady, I could not have come hither, if it were not that the road which I must take leads me to Dunharrow.”

And she answered as one that likes not what is said: “Then, lord, you are astray; for out of Harrowdale no road runs east or south; and you had best return as you came.”

“Nay, lady,” said he, “I am not astray; for I walked in this land ere you were born to grace it. There is a road out of this valley, and that road I shall take. Tomorrow I shall ride by the Paths of the Dead!” Then she stared at him as one that is stricken, and her face blanched, and for long she spoke no more, while all sat silent. (3.60-1)

Astonishingly, this is the distant, epic tone Tolkien adopts for one of the most emotionally charged moments in the entire book: Eowyn, who is in love with Aragorn, learns that he is about to do a dangerous thing she cannot understand while simultaneously her belief that her love is reciprocated is being politely dismissed.

Tolkien does not adopt this cold tone for all emotional encounters (if he did, of course, no one would read his books): the hobbits’ emotions are warmly and gracefully told. Tolkien can deal with emotions in hobbits. Significantly, it is the men and women that make Tolkien stiffen as a narrator. It is like watching a couple unable to muster any warmth for each other lavish affection on their dog.

Eowyn is a wonderful creation – see Helen Luke’s marvellous essay on her for the depths that can be found in her story – but Tolkien handles her with difficulty, and she is the only female given any roundness in the narrative. This is a tale about bachelors. Frodo, Sam, Merry, Pippin, Gandalf, Saruman, Sauron, Aragorn, Boromir, Legolas, Gimli, Bilbo, Gollum – all the main characters are drawn without women (Sam and Aragorn do, of course, marry by the end, but neither of their wives have any role in the story or are anything other than lovely). Frodo and Bilbo are conspicous bachelors. It is not even clear that dwarves, who do reproduce, have any females. Tolkien devotes much ink to them but he never mentions a wife nor a woman among them. Galadriel and Goldberry are loveliness incarnate, not really women. Tolkien has little to say about the female.

All these defects of substance and style, however, have not prevented me from reading Tolkien’s work, nor from enjoying it, nor from wanting to write about it. Why is this?

First of all, it is because Tolkien has succeeded in creating myth – a symbolic world born out of and illuminating the depths of the psyche. I do not know if anyone before Tolkien ever delineated the forms of elf, dwarf, halfling, wizard, and goblin as he did, but certainly in his hands they stand out in all their grand archetypal clarity. What is more, he married his world of symbols to a grand, epic narrative which itself marries the worlds of light and darkness. It is an achievement similar to that of Wagner, with scholarly thoroughness standing in (somewhat weakly) for artistic brilliance.

In a good story (and according to the most enlightened wisdom, in the universe), everything belongs; and often Tolkien’s narrative has a deep coherence in which even the deviations from the plan lead the story to its consummation. This is true of the whole tale, although the best microcosm of this is the tragedy of Saruman.

Saruman is the most truly tragic figure in the whole story; he is evil but not irredeemably so, and he fell because of temptation. He thought he could maintain his independence in an alliance with evil, to “ride the storm” as Gandalf calls it; and he instructs a company of orcs, both his own and Sauron’s, who were supposed to waylay the ringbearing party and bring the hobbits to Sauron, to instead bring the hobbits to him. The orcs end up capturing the wrong hobbits, and are bringing them to Saruman’s citadel when they end up disputing with each other along party lines. This (and an attack from men) allow the hobbits to escape into the forest, though they are now separated from the ringbearer and everything they know. There they meet Treebeard the Ent, who personifies the forces of nature: slow to anger but terrible in wrath. The hobbits end up being the catalysts for Treebeard to rouse his Ents to destroy Saruman.

This is deeply satisfying, because all the small details are but an ingenious mechanism for displaying spiritual truths; that the great bring their own destruction upon them; that nature cannot be neglected forever (Saruman is primarily a technician); that often our deepest effectiveness in the world is found precisely in the things we never planned to do; and in the larger context of the plot, that great evil is often thwarted by the lesser evils it employs to achieve its ends. Not only is Saruman’s plot foiled by one of his henchmen, but Sauron’s plot is in many ways foiled by Saruman as well. This is put in microcosmic form when Wormtongue, a creature of Saruman, tries to brain Gandalf by throwing from Saruman’s tower one of Saruman’s most precious objects.

What is more, this part of the story is defined by consistently excellent handling of narrative. First of all, the Ents are a completely unknown quantity, unknown even to the people of Middle-Earth. (They are also archetypally satisfying: everyone assigns personality and ancient wisdom and power to trees in their less rational moods.) The reader wants to know about them because the characters are so curious about them themselves. But the hobbits are continually talking about how powerful they might be. Then you have the Entmoot, three days of Ents thundering and booming in the woods while rousing themselves to the task – i.e., three days of building dramatic tension. Then you have the march of the Ents, their numbers being mysteriously swelled as they move. Inserted between these events are chapters following the other members of the Fellowship of the Ring, as Tolkien skilfully postpones the reader’s finding out just how powerful these Ents are. And in the end, you still learn of their power indirectly: when the narrative returns Isengard is completely destroyed and has become a mound of rubble with, curiously, a lake in its midst. You then get the story of its destruction from the hobbits – a perspective which allows Tolkien great freedom to emote on the sheer force and violence displayed.

Tolkien also gives himself the pleasure of dwelling on his creation – the aptness of Saruman’s punishment – through the medium of Gandalf, who as the wise man muses endlessly on the aptness of events.

“The enemy has failed – so far. Thanks to Saruman.”
“Then is not Saruman a traitor?” said Gimli.
“Indeed yes,” said Gandalf. “Doubly. And is not that strange? Nothing we have endured of late has seemed so grievous as the treason of Isengard. Even reckoned as a lord and captain Saruman has grown very strong. He threatens the Men of Rohan and draws off their help from Minas Tirith, even as the main blow is approaching from the East. Yet a treacherous weapon is ever a danger to the hand. Saruman also had a mind to capture the Ring, for himself, or at least to snare some hobbits for his evil purposes. So between them our enemies have contrived only to bring Merry and Pippin with marvellous speed, and in the nick of time, to Fangorn, where otherwise they would never have come at all!” (2.119)

Gandalf is another of Tolkien’s great triumphs. He is the finest depiction of the wise man archetype I know of in all art; there is hardly a line even the most sensitive reader would want to withdraw from Tolkien’s portrait of the wizard. His wise sayings are only rarely belabored or overly epic-ified; there are enough of them to please (“the burned hand teaches best,” “perilous to us all are the devices of an art deeper than we possess ourselves”), but all of them are pointed and well placed. And again, it is a sign of Tolkien’s genius that he constructs a plot so satisfying to our sense of plausibility that we will accept a character who spends much of his time musing aloud on the twists of the plot!

And the greatest plot twist of all comes at the end, whose aptness is indeed something to muse on. The task of destroying the Ring could not have been accomplished without the last desperate betrayal of Gollum. Gollum had saved himself from death countless times by pathetically begging for the mercy of those who threatened him. Something in him always woke the compassion of others, despite the fact that he was dangerous, self-interested, and even treacherous. The fact that he aroused this compassion indicated a goodness in him; and this compassion is richly rewarded by this tale. Indeed at its foundation this is a tale of compassion; its great teaching is to have the patience to say as Gandalf said when an attempt to capture and kill Gollum was discussed, “He must do what he will. But he may play a part yet that neither he nor Sauron has foreseen” (1.307).

And this brings us to the great reason for reading Tolkien, despite all his failings as an artist. In creating true myth he has brought to light the unconscious parts of our psyche, of which Gollum and Frodo are the two best examples. The two are clearly a pair; Gandalf muses on this several times, calling Gollum “of hobbit-kind”:

Even Bilbo’s story suggests the kinship. There was a great deal in the background of their minds and memories that was very similar. They understood one another remarkably well, very much better than a hobbit would understand, say, a Dwarf, or an Orc, or even an Elf. Think of the riddles they both knew, for one thing. (1.79-80)

Frodo reacts with horror to the idea that a vile creature like Gollum could have originally been something nice like a hobbit, but Gandalf rebuffs him: “I think it is a sad story,” said the wizard, “and it might have happened to others, even to some hobbits that I have known” (1.79). Frodo himself could turn into a Gollum: for there is a Gollum inside of him, only waiting to be developed by a harsh turn of experience. Gollum is Frodo’s shadow self, the part of every person that remains unacknowledged in civilized society. The call to adventure many times is little other than this: you cannot develop further with only the safe parts of you, which society wants for its own purposes; you need experience of a different and more terrifying sort to come to know your shadow self. And it is only by knowing and integrating those energies (one chapter refers to Gollum’s “taming”) that you can accomplish great things. Tolkien even goes so far as to make Gollum the guide of the journey – he is required to bring Frodo to the threshold of Mordor, the Underworld. Surely everyone knows how little we accomplish without enlisting the aid of our hatred, our lust, our greed, or our pride – and how dangerous this alliance is. We can be betrayed at any time.

Yet unless we recognize this part of ourselves, and treat it with compassion, the most likely outcome is failure. Those darker parts of ourselves master us particularly when we deny them – Frodo without Gollum’s aid would have turned into another Gollum. (And of course, in the end, psychologically Frodo’s solitary willpower did fail – but he was saved anyway, as things turned out, even by his shadow side.) Gollum cannot be merely dismissed as evil and done away with. “The stone that the builder rejected has become the cornerstone.” This is a great teaching; and also, curiously, why the epic parts of the book are so unsatisfying. The great battles are all predicated on the idea that the enemy is pure evil, and may be slaughtered wherever found. There is no purpose in capturing orcs: destruction is really what is required. I suppose this is a useful way of thinking in war; but are there really any orcs? Any Saurons? Any examples of pure evil? (Gandalf does mention a few times that he feels compassion for “the servants of the Dark Lord,” but that never has any impact on the conduct of the war.)

What is more, the epic battles between good and evil are not integral to the story. They serve, literally, as a masking device: according to the plot, the battles are fought so that Sauron believes that he needs to win a war, whereas in fact the main action is Frodo making the trip to Mount Doom. It is all stage-play without soul; as its writing attests.

For the teaching of Tolkien’s hobbits is not to value the epic and the grand. The world is saved by a hobbit, his friend, and the vile creature he initially despised and later befriended as best he could. And hobbits are fat, short, gossipy, gluttonous, small-minded, lovers of comfort, lazy, and ignorant. They barely have any truck with weapons, nor any with books. They have no magic powers and are no match for a man in battle. They are, in other words, the furthest thing from heroism that could be imagined, the last character anyone would want to be when playing Dungeons and Dragons. And this is one of the great ironies of Tolkien’s legacy. By weaving a vast epic fantasy of battles of orcs and men into his tale of the Ring, and by larding it with an infinite scholarly apparatus, he showed that he valued precisely the thing that his tale would teach him not to.

One of the end results of this is that you feel that his telling is not the final one. In future ages, when his writing has become dated, we may see another author take his story and clean it up a bit. It is one of those great creations that is certain to be rescued even from the vices of its author.