Re-read reviews: Lord of the Rings, by JRR Tolkien

OK, so everyone knows this trilogy, but if I'm going to do reviews of books I've read more than once I had to start here, because I read LOTR every year between ages 9 and 18 or so, and have read it several more times since.

What I love about it:

1. Tolkien's world-building is justly famous. Every place in Middle Earth has a history and a language and a culture and, to a certain extent, an ecology. It feels like a real place, and every time I read it I wish I could visit Lothlorien (the elf city built up on platforms in the stately golden-leaved mallorn trees), or the mysterious depths of Fangorn forest, or the cozy hobbit holes of the shire+.

2. This is a classic epic adventure, but the people the story truly turns on - the hobbits - are everyman characters. They aren't magic users or big strapping warriors, or in any way the classic hero archetype. They are literally the little people of this world, but they turn out to be among the bravest and most capable characters in the story...as overlooked, ordinary people so often do in real life.

3. The friendships in this story are amazing and beautiful. Merry and Pippin are inseparable from the start, but the friendships that develop over the course of the story are even better. The two most notable are Gimli and Legolas, and Frodo and Sam. In the first, the dwarf and the elf have some racial prejudice to get over initially, but they develop into a really fun odd-couple pairing who absolutely have each other's backs. With Aragorn, they make a great dynamic trio. The class dynamics with Frodo and Sam can get a little awkward (Sam starts out as Frodo's gardener, and keeps calling him 'Master Frodo'), but Frodo would never have completed his quest without Sam and he knows and appreciates that.

4. The symbolism of the ring is cool*. The people who can carry it the longest without being fully corrupted (Bilbo and Frodo) are the ones who aren't powerful and who don't want power. It does have some corrosive effect on them - but not to the point of Frodo actually turning on Sam, for instance, as he does in the movie. Those who have at least some power and wield it wisely - Gandalf, Aragorn, Galadriel - refuse to even touch the ring, because they would really be in a position to do damage with it, and know they might be tempted to do so, telling themselves they were doing good. Tolkien may not have been a fan of direct allegory, but we can think of all sorts of real-world tools that would be tempting to use for someone in a position of power but which could turn one quickly into a "dark lord" - nuclear weapons, for instance, or extensive surveillance. Part of Sauron's downfall is that he puts so much of himself into the ring that when it is destroyed he goes with it, which is another sort of cautionary message.

5. The hole-dwelling food-loving hobbits and the tree-like "let's not be hasty" ents are some of the best original fantasy creatures ever.  You could also include Gollum in this category (yes, precious, you could) although he is more an altered individual than a separate species. I cannot get enough of any of them.

6. The poetry of the language - sometimes literally. Tolkien was inspired by classic epics like Beowulf, and it shows. The writing is beautiful, and much as how in Broadway musicals characters sing when they feel to much to speak, characters frequently break out into actual verse.


+ - Fortunately the movie adaptation did a fantastic job on this aspect.

* - Unfortunately, the movie messes this up by having the ring affect the characters too similarly. Poor Faramir got done dirty.


Some less lovable things:

1. There is no getting around it: there are not enough women in this story to even make a halfway realistic world. Some species lack females altogether; there don't seem to be any female dwarves or orcs at all, and the entwives are "lost"^. And even among humans, elves, and hobbits females rarely even get a mention. This is odd because Tolkien was actually quite good at writing female characters when he bothered. Eowyn the "shieldmaiden" of Rohan is awesome - and not just because she gets to take out the chief Ringwraith. You also get more insight into her psychology than for any characters outside the main Fellowship. Galadriel, while less well developed, is clearly wise and powerful, and Lobelia Sackville-Baggins and farmer Maggot's wife are tough and funny hobbit ladies. But it is no wonder the filmmakers felt a need to give Arwen, Aragorn's love interest, slightly more to do&, and to insert a line for Gimli about dwarf women looking just like dwarf men (an explanation I suspect they stole from Terry Pratchett's 'Discworld' novels).

2. The incessant connection between 'swarthiness' and evil is not cute. Would it be too much to ask to have at least one or two dark-skinned good guys? Having Aragorn's super-long-lived kingly lineage literally be called the "men of the west" is a bit on the nose too. I should say I don't think Tolkien did this on purpose - he strongly disliked Nazi appropriation of Norse mythology in the cause of white supremacy, for instance. It was probably the result of how he set up the geography of Middle Earth plus some inadequately-examined attitudes of his time. And there is a nice moment of empathy where Sam looks at a dying Southron soldier and wonders how he ended up fighting on the bad-guy side and if he wouldn't have rather stayed home. But it is still a thing that non-white readers in particular will notice.

3. This bit never bothered me personally, but there is kind of a lot of padding in these books. The interval with Tom Bombadil, for instance, is lovely and magical...and entirely unnecessary to the plot. You can cut it and change nothing, as in fact the film did. It also contributes to what I've heard called a 'rocking horse pace', where moments of tension get sort of defused when the main characters just stop to rest and recuperate and hear the legends of some new location for a while. As I say, this was no problem for me, but some readers are turned off by it.


^ - I actually wrote a book-length story my first year of college that was about 1/3 LOTR fanfiction, including a bit about what the heck happened to the entwives.

& - Though they undermine it in the later movies by having her pining away and almost dying for no reason, rather than making herself somewhat useful by sewing Aragorn a battle standard like she does in the book.


Overall conclusion: What can I say? This trilogy is a classic that any fantasy fan should pick up. That doesn't mean it is perfect, and it is nice to see more recent works taking inspiration but working on the flaws. But it is still well worth a read. And re-read. And re-re-read.  

Popular posts from this blog

First impressions review: The Overstory, by Richard Powers

Image
For the first 127 pages of this book, I thought its subtitle – ‘a novel’ – was inaccurate. What it seemed to be was a series of short stories with sometimes strong, sometimes tenuous tree connections. An immigrant family travels west, carrying American chestnut seeds that take root and grow far from where the blight will strike. Adam, a probably-autistic boy, watches ants and obsesses over which trees his father chooses to plant to represent his siblings. The daughter of a Chinese immigrant tries to understand why her father killed himself under the mulberry tree in their backyard. Good, engaging stories, beautifully written, but not a novel. Then I hit Patricia Westerford. Patricia is a partially deaf girl who discovers her love of plants through her agricultural extension agent father (yes, another dad - moms just fuss in the background in this book). As part of her graduate work, she starts collecting the gases given off by trees, and comes to the startling conc...
Read more

First impressions review: Last Night At The Telegraph Club, by Malinda Lo

Image
              This historical fiction follows Lily Hu, growing up in San Francisco’s Chinatown in the 1950s and realizing she is in love with her classmate, Kathleen Miller. But it also has flashbacks to earlier episodes in the life of her parents and aunt that give more depth and variety to the depiction of Chinese-American life in the mid-twentieth-century. The titular Telegraph Club 1 that is both a welcoming and affirming place for Lily and Kath and a danger, given the frequency of raids and how association with leftists or homosexuals could be used as an excuse for deportation in this time period, not to mention general social ostracism. However, although there are some scary moments, this is overall a really sweet, uplifting, hopeful story.   1. Fictional, but based on several real San Francisco lesbian clubs that featured ‘male impersonators’.         ...
Read more

It oughta be a movie: Silence, by Heldris of Cornwall

Image
  This thirteenth century semi-Arthurian romance 1 featuring a female (or at least AFAB) knight contains some truly fascinating takes on gender for the period. Besides the titular knight, Silence, it also contains their parents’ love story, which is unusuall y sweet and well-balanced between the parties, even by today’s standards. All that, of course, only makes the “happy” ending more of a gut-punch! I was of course expecting that Silence would either die or go back to living as a woman, because that’s the kind of ending a medieval audience would accept. Silence doesn’t die, but…the person they are dies, in a more upsetting way than had to be the case.  However, one could easily adapt this as a more positive feminist and/or queer tale by tweaking the very end, and I’d quite like to see that done (indeed, I’m somewhat tempted to do it myself!)   1.Merlin appears in it, but Arthur does not   If you want to avoid further spoilers…just stop here a...
Read more